<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Channels in the Canopy by Marsmiims</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29250330">Channels in the Canopy</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marsmiims/pseuds/Marsmiims'>Marsmiims</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Naruto</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F, F/M, Founders Era, Gen, M/M, No Beta, Politics, Pre-Canon, Pre-Konoha Village, Tags to be added, mentions of philosophy, philosophy building, world building</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 11:33:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>20,598</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29250330</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marsmiims/pseuds/Marsmiims</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Peace is a dream and reality’s heavy hand often has a way of shaking one awake. After all, armistices reluctantly hammered out by two warring lords are not often maintained, and if there is one thing that ‘needs doing’ in their world, it is the shedding of blood.</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>Uchiha Haia spends the better part of her youth trying to figure out how she slots into her clan, and how her clan should makes its name in the Land of Fire.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Minor or Background Relationship(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. The Sprout</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the murky dawn of primordial youth, that time of life evoked as ideas and impressions rather than through memory, Haia feels love. </p>
<p>Her mother teaches her brother to hold her gently, and her brother, only a few years her senior, picks her up and won’t put her down. </p>
<p>He looks down on her almost reverently and whispers over her wispy hair, “You’re my little sister.”</p>
<p>Her father calls her brother Akarui, her mother dubs him Suzume for the swift sparrow, and when she can finally form her mouth around the syllables of his title she calls him Anija, because that is who he is to her.</p>
<p>He carries her on his shoulders, and he and mother swing her between them. Her mother seasons their rice porridge with sesame, and her brother’s hair smells like peppermint after he washes it. On the rare days her father finds himself home, he picks her up and swings her around the house, her toes dancing away from the floor. </p>
<p>At nights, she and her brother share a pallet on the floor in the kitchen and sleep cuddled like two young cats after a long day at play. It’s how she learns the smell of peppermint and how he knows the smell of new grass. </p>
<p>Then her mother gets big around the middle, her father beams but her brother begins to disappear. </p>
<p>When he comes back the word handsome trails after him. Handsome and dutiful and how proud you must be. </p>
<p>“Look at how nice you brother looks in our colors,” says her father as he places her hand on the uchiwa fan on her brother’s back. Her father and brother stand side by side, matching, in wide legged pants and billowing cloaks.</p>
<p>“So handsome,” she mimes, “Anija is very handsome,” as he beams down at her with his dimpled smile and picks her up. </p>
<p>She curls into him. Haia, at a young age likes to be carried, she likes to be held.</p>
<p>Then her father comes back one day in the arms of her Uncle Hirako.</p>
<p>“It’s not good,” says Akarui, trying to be brave, “Dad’s lost an arm.”</p>
<p>“But he had two arms,” she says as he holds her own up, “So he still has…” she says straining to do the math, “one.”</p>
<p>Akarui smiles with his wide mouth, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. She remembers that later. A smile without joy.</p>
<p>Her brother is right: it’s not good. Her father goes into his room and it smells bad, like sick, or sickness, not health. Her mother weeps as she hides behind her waving hair, and her brother’s dimpled mouth pinches at the corners.</p>
<p>When her father wakes up he has new lines about his mouth and eyes, and he’s tied knots at the end every long left sleeve. He never picks her up again.</p>
<p>She makes the mistake of playing with one once, his empty sleeve, and the look her father gives her, without recognition or warmth, deafens her love for him. </p>
<p>He slides his kunai under the floorboards, picks up the dreaded hoe and spends his days in back breaking labor in the rice fields.</p>
<p>“What’s wrong with daddy?”  </p>
<p>Akarui, barely older than she, can only shrug helplessly.  </p>
<p>Mother smiles sadly, her belly grows with the lines next to her mouth. </p>
<p>“You’re going to have a brother or sister soon. Are you excited?”</p>
<p>“Not really,” she answers honestly, “I already have a brother. He’s all I need.”</p>
<p>Akarui laughs behind her and rubs a hands though her curls.</p>
<p>“But that just means you don’t know you need this one.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know mom,” she looks at her mother’s swollen middle speculatively, “What if they’re not what you want?”</p>
<p>Her mom pushes her lips together and then pushes them out in a wry smile, “I don’t know what I want, so I will be happy with what I have.”</p>
<p>Parenthood and the ideas around it only confuse her more, “But what if, what if it takes your love away from Anija or me?”</p>
<p> “Love only grows my little swift,” says her mother, who scoops her up for kisses.</p>
<p>“But everything’s going to change,” says young Haia with a hitch in her voice and a quiver in her lip.</p>
<p>“This change is for the better,” says her mother through her exasperation.</p>
<p>But her mother is wrong. It’s not for the better.</p>
<p>She gets bigger and bigger, till her mother can hardly stand. Then it, the baby, wants to come out. Women come, women who bring Haia into the birthing room, the room they locker her father in, and they instruct her to clean. Another tells her to hold her mother’s hand and help her push, and her mother screams and squeezes Haia’s hand so hard that it feels like she’s trying to twist it off. </p>
<p>Haia looks down on her mother’s sweat-streaked face, but her mother doesn’t look up. A strange concoction of emotions steals over Haia as she looks down on her. Fear, sadness even revolution, she feels them all. Her mother pulls her close and whispers something to her.</p>
<p> Haia forgets it. When it’s over, she no longer holds her mother’s hand, only necklace strung on a silk robe with a small glass pendant.</p>
<p>The shouts become feeble, and one of the women, voice hushed, pitched deep with dread says, “It’s breech.”</p>
<p> And Haia’s mother, like her father, leaves the sick room changed, cold, empty, hollow.</p>
<p>Her brother uses a different word, “Dead,”</p>
<p>She’s taken Haia’s nameless younger sister with her. </p>
<p>One relative tells her, pityingly, “they’re in a better place now.”</p>
<p>Haia can only ask, “But where is better than here?”</p>
<p>Her aunty can only frown, her face cracks with grief.</p>
<p>Her father closes the door to that sick smelling room and does not leave it for days. She would go to her brother about her listless father, but Akarui spends more time in the fields now than he does at home.</p>
<p>Haia decides she’s never taking the necklace off again.</p>
<p>Akarui does not know about the door in their house that hides the hole that their father throws his joy into. </p>
<p>Instead her brother grows slimmer, angrier—maybe stronger. </p>
<p>Her father hides his grief behind bottles of sake and Haia slowly begins to disappear, the hungry thing inside her eats her away. </p>
<p>Haia tries to tell Akarui, but he has shadows behind his eyes as well. </p>
<p>“Later,” he says before shutting the door on her too.</p>
<p>Akarui doesn’t have time to carry her around the house. He’s too busy putting food on the table. But they do still share the pallet in the kitchen, and when the world closes in on her at night, he holds her so that she can find sleep.</p>
<p>Then one day he does not come back. She squirms in the bed by herself, shivering in the autumn air.</p>
<p>The next morning dawns cool and golden and a man in fine armor with the uchiwa on his breast knocks on their door.</p>
<p>Haia answers and bows low, as she has been taught, and her father lets that door to his dark room creak open. </p>
<p>Her father utters a sound she’s never heard of him before, something between a woof and a wail, high and keening, but deep from his lungs.</p>
<p>“The conflict with the Senju child hunters.”</p>
<p>The armored man says more, but Haia does not comprehend any of it.</p>
<p>Still too young to understand loss, she reminds her father of all that is gone.</p>
<p>He shambles back into that room and locks the door.</p>
<p>The first thing she knows is love, but the second she learns of soon after: war and its accomplices, sorrow, despair and loneliness. They leave a taste like ash in her mouth.</p>
<p>Shortly thereafter, in a thoughtless pique, her father says, “I named you so that you would be swift,” he pauses and takes a dainty sip his drink, “but I see now that you will amount to nothing.”</p>
<p>It does not matter that he is-was normally kind, that her brother has just died or that the drink slurs his words. His statement, thoughtlessly spoken into his deafening sorrow, follows her for the rest of her life. </p>
<p>She does not know if he speaks the truth (and does not recognize that maybe he is just seeing something in himself or the world that they live in), but she vows in that moment to be–something. Something something-something to fill the emptiness she knows could grow in her as it blossoms in her father. Hollow, it follows her around their empty house, tossing the hair on the back of her neck.</p>
<p>His words have the opposite effect of what her father might have wanted (to have a child to grow old, to meet his grandchildren). Instead Haia searches for something that Uchiha can distinguish themselves in. She searches for a thing that will make her something.</p>
<p>Find it she does. </p>
<p>A thunk thunk lures her, like a hand patting a steady rhythm on a deep bellied drum. As she gets closer, a shrill whistling like the wind joins, followed soon by shouts and huffs and puffs. It’s a cacophony of symphonic sounds, something like the nightmarish music that shrills from the traveling kabuki theater that ventures their way once a year.</p>
<p>A man in a topknot strides across the field, and she sticks to the fence like a limpet, breathing into the wood. The boys thudding before her wear the same cloths as her brother. </p>
<p>And hadn’t he looked handsome?</p>
<p>Top-knot man moves to the fence, jumps as he takes note of her and smiles down. Grey threads his hair, and a scar tears across his neck.</p>
<p>He speaks with a voice like the river, of pebbles grinding over each other as they grumble down to the seas, “Are you lost young man?”</p>
<p>She doesn’t even notice his mistake, so intent is she on the movement before her. One young man holds a slice of silver in his hand and makes the light dance, “What is this?”</p>
<p>“We are training our young boys for the clan, so they might fight with glory and with honor.”</p>
<p>Glory and honor, unfamiliar terms, so she asks, “OK, what are Glory and Honor?”</p>
<p>Bemused, Top-knot man squints into the sun and rubs the scraggily beard at the edge of his scar, “Honorable is to do what is right, and glory… glory, glory, glory,” he mutters to himself, at a loss of how to explain an abstract noun to a five-year old, “Great honor, for doing something difficult, but good.”</p>
<p>Haia perks up, glory and honor sound a lot like ... “so not useless.”</p>
<p>Top-knot looks down on her and intones, “The opposite of useless.”</p>
<p>She scrambles up and stands on the fence post so that she might better look him in the eye, “So teach me. I want glory and honor.”</p>
<p>“You want glory and honor for the clan,” he says as he looks her over.</p>
<p>“For the clan,” she mimes.</p>
<p>“You look a little young, but starting a little early never hurt anybody,” he turns to the crowd of boys tussling in the dust before him, “Come tomorrow early for remedial training.”</p>
<p>Top-knot has a name; he introduces himself to ’the boys’ after he’s ground down what little ego she’d had in remedial lessons.</p>
<p>“My name is Uchiha Kaito, call me sensei” he begins without preamble, “In my hands you will become the bright young flames our clan needs. I will be responsible for your education, with the kunai and waribashi, with katana and open palm. That does not mean that this education is limited to your physical capabilities, for we are Uchiha and we need minds as sharp as our swords. Monday and Thursday afternoons are mine, Wednesdays, Ayumu-sensei will winnow the genjutsu specialist, Tuesday and Friday afternoons are for ninjutsu, weekends are for learning. Any questions?”</p>
<p>One young man, Yori-something raises his hand. Kaito-sensei squints at the boy presses his lips together and begins to stare, after a minute, Yori-something puts his hand down and rubs the back of his red neck.</p>
<p>Haia simply calls out, “What about the farms?”</p>
<p>She is expected to work in the mornings, it is the growing season after all. Her mother had cropped her hair in a testament to it. It’s grown to a fuzzy puff that floats around her head. Two of her new classmates have already tried to rub it.</p>
<p>“We meet after the hottest part of the day, no reason for you caterpillars to collapse of heat exhaustion,” answers Sensei.</p>
<p>Her year mates, two brother named Yorimatsu and Yorikashi, and their rat faced cousin Rin, become fast companions. Together they watch the young clan heirs outpace them from a distance. For while the majority of the youths have duties in the house and field, Uchiha nobility learn only to fight. She catches the back of one once. Someone calls his name, Izuna, Izuna-sama trounces everyone he crosses he crosses. </p>
<p>She cannot help but envy the way he moves with a sword, as graceful as the light glimmering off the diverted Naka river before sunset. However, she admires from a distance, for young Uchiha Izuna might as well live in the stratosphere for all that they will interact. </p>
<p>Training proves to be as rigorous as her work in the fields, but Haia puts all of her will behind improving.</p>
<p>She hopes she will live up to her name, that something in her will turn out to be quicker and swifter than her mates, but her speed is average. She throws kunai as well as Yorikashi, has no inherent talent with infiltration, can barely muster the most wavering illusion and her fireball jutsu grows to be the size of a melon (a cantaloupe, not a watermelon). </p>
<p>The genjutsu strikes her tender ego hardest, for Ayumu-sensei’s keen control and attention to detail make her one of the only Uchiha women currently fielded for missions. If only she could excel there, but Haia, while controlled, also has a mind prone to wandering.</p>
<p>Saturdays and Sundays quickly rise in her esteem. They are the days the Kaito puts down his blade and limps his way across the classroom. There he wakes up something in Haia she did know lived, a hunger different than the one that fueled her expansive eating. </p>
<p>“Kanji, everyone should know how to read and write.”</p>
<p>“But why?” asks a boy with turtle eyes in the back, “What’s the point?”</p>
<p>Kaito rubs his scar and frowns, “It teaches you how to think.”</p>
<p>Haia scrunches her face up, thinking that she is thinking-what is wrong with her thinking?  She vows to ask what he means… after class.</p>
<p>“I know how to think,” answers another boy. </p>
<p>Kaito pelts him with chalk, “No you don’t… I want soldiers who can do more than follow orders. I need young men who can think on their feet. I need leaders.”</p>
<p>He surveys the room and sighs.</p>
<p>Luckily the sunset saves him, “I expect you here tomorrow after your families release you from farm work.”</p>
<p>Haia, with nothing to pack up, sits quietly until she is the only one left.</p>
<p>“Sensei,” she says as she approaches him from behind, she sees his shoulders tense, “How does reading and writing teach me to think? How do I become a better thinker?”</p>
<p>He turns to her and frowns, not really sure about the tiny boy (actually a girl) in front of him.</p>
<p>“Interesting,” he says and then jumps in, “How do reading and writing teach me to be a better thinker,” he says automatically, “do is the proper conjugation for a plural topic.”</p>
<p>“Reading and writing make it… plural? What’s plural?”</p>
<p>“More than one.”</p>
<p>“Reading and writing, more than one topic,” she nods. </p>
<p>His eyebrows climb up his forehead and he covers his scraggily beard with a hand, “Reading and writing help with visualizing abstractions and untangle complicated ideas.”</p>
<p>“Okay,” she says as she screws her face and stares at the box of fine wet sand before her, “What is visualize? What is an abstraction, and what is complicated? And-”</p>
<p>He holds up his hand, then picks up the stylus she had been using to scratch symbols into the sand.</p>
<p>“Visualize means see. Now draw a tree.”</p>
<p>She frowns, she knows what a tangle is, her mother complained about them constantly when trying to comb her hair (Haia eventually banished her mother’s comb from her presence), so un-tangle must be un-doing a tangle. But the others?</p>
<p>Haia stares down at the sand and decides to humor the man, two parallel lines with lots of space between them: the trunk, then other smaller versions of the trunk all over the place: branches, and then finally, fluffy cloud-like poofs: the leaves. She displays her finished product to him.</p>
<p>“So that’s a tree?” he seems unimpressed.</p>
<p>Haia pulls the sand board closer to her and scrutinizes it, maybe she could add more leaf detail? She begins filling the poofs in. Then gets bored and thinks about his question.</p>
<p>“It’s not a tree. I can’t put a tree on the board, that would be impossible.”</p>
<p>“So it’s not a tree?” he asks.</p>
<p>She shrugs, “No,” she squints down at it, but what is it, she begins to frown and thinks about how she could make it more tree like, but she can’t. Besides, most people would know the drawing was meant to be a tree by looking at it. She jerks her head up.</p>
<p>“It’s not a tree, but people know I drew one.”</p>
<p>His eyebrows meet his hairline.</p>
<p>“You drew and abstraction,” Kaito’s voice changes, Haia will come to associate this tone with his professorial guise (after she learns the word), but this is her first time interacting with it, “an abstraction is the simplification of an idea, usually a way to send meaning and ideas.”</p>
<p>Haia looks up at him though her dark lashes and blinks, “So most drawing are abstractions.”</p>
<p>“Most drawing are abstractions,” he says, as he rubs at his scar and stares into the waning afternoon light, he catches himself in his musings, “Complicated… is like the tree. Trees have many parts, trunks, stems, branches, bark, leaves, interconnected to make the whole.”</p>
<p>Haia looks down at her sand box again, her mind feels like many tiny hands trying to reach for ideas she barely knows are there, “So reading and writing help make simple, big ideas. Like the tree, which has many parts, but can be… drawn,” she points to her own tree.</p>
<p>He smiles for the first time, “Yes, they can be drawn as Kanji, they can hold more than one idea in them too,” he would go on, but the purple in the sky lets him know how little time he has left.</p>
<p>“One last thing sensei. What is the kanji for tree?”</p>
<p>He grins.</p>
<p>The days begin to wane, middays rest cooler and Haia’s hair begins to grow.</p>
<p>One morning Rat-faced-Rin tugs on one wavy lock and says, “Haiaku Haia-kun, or somebody will mistake you for a girl,” he grimaces, making him look like an evil-eyed mongoose.</p>
<p>The Yori brothers laugh with him, but Haia, who sees nothing wrong with being a girl, only shrugs at him puzzled. Wisely, she says nothing, but something catches her eyes.</p>
<p>“Like that girl?” she points.</p>
<p>Yorimatsu looks to where she points and blushes right to the roots of his hair, his brother frowns and Rin yelps as Haia pushes him from the fence post he had been resting on.  The late afternoon light blocks their view, but the girl follows Ayumu-sensei like a chick follows its mother. </p>
<p>Haia frowns, there’s something about the girl’s profile, the cut of her hair against the sun, the rigidity of her posture that tickles Haia’s memory.</p>
<p>Yorimatsu and Yorikashi both spy on the conversation from the shadows a few scrubs, while Rin glowers from his new seat. Rin had tried his hardest to garner Ayumu-sensei’s attention, but it hadn’t been enough. This girl however, had Ayumu-sensei raving, or as close to raving as was possible for the austere Uchiha. The distance and the crickets drown out the conversation.</p>
<p>The girl turns, as if sensing their attention and it’s the flip of the hair that does it. She’d last seen that gesture at her brother’s funeral. Her father’s younger sister’s daughter had spent the entire evening staring at her, but flipped her hair when Haia had tried to greet her.</p>
<p>“That’s my cousin Nanase!”</p>
<p>The two girls eye each other from across the field. Haia stands and trots halfway across before the other girl catches her eye, scowls and looks away. Shocked, Haia stops in her tracks. </p>
<p>A repeat of the funeral. It had made Haia so sad. What a stuck up girl! Haia sticks her tongue out for good measure.</p>
<p>“Your cousin,” says Yorikashi as his brother buts in, “Can you introduce me?”</p>
<p>The brother’s Yori exchange a few blows, while Rat-faced-Rin slides next to her and asks,<br/>
“Your cousin any good?”</p>
<p>Haia shrugs, “How should I know?”</p>
<p>The two girls stare at each other across the chilled-heat of the day and turn away from each other. No way they could ever be friends, says the frigid air between them.</p>
<p>Haia turns six that autumn.</p>
<p>She can wave a sword well enough, and her second affinity, wind, partners well with fire, or so she had been told. But Her cousin already excels at the genjutsu exercises that left her panting in the dust. Nothing in her shines, nothing in her is glory-ful or glorious, or whatever word it was that Kaito-sensei used. Nothing is good enough. Nothing is enough.</p>
<p>Glory. Honor. Would that she could find those in herself. Haia looks at her reflection in the ditch behind the training ground and frowns at it.</p>
<p>But she exhales those thoughts away and tries not to let these supposed inadequacies sink into her head. She knows that when she does this, when she compares herself her cousin Nanase, or even Izuna-sama of the stratosphere, that her father is right: She knows she will amount to no-thing. </p>
<p>So she teaches herself to look away and she feels like a coward for it.</p>
<p>Her solace lies in kenjutsu. From her, each kata sounds as a prayer, the whoosh of her practice sword cutting through the air the chime of a bell. </p>
<p>Let-me-get-better, let-me-excel, let-me-be-glorious, honor-glory-honor-glory. That’s what she hears with each strike.</p>
<p>Glory-glory-glory-glory-glory, she chants, not-nothing, something. Let me be something.</p>
<p>She chants even when the hunger makes her arms empty and sends headaches to her temples. </p>
<p>She practices them well after the other boys leave. When it’s just her and the sunset swinging a wooden sword, working her way through a kata.</p>
<p>The steps make sense to her, each one in order, designed to tie together. Each step deliberate, each swing precise. The form is the only one she knows, but she’s repeated it enough, stumbled through so often that she thinks she begins to understand it. </p>
<p>When she exhales, the world comes back to her, the wind through the trees, the setting sun, Sensei and his keen eyes.</p>
<p>“Ah!” she bows and feels her face heat up, “Sensei, I didn’t see you.”</p>
<p>He squints at her and swallows, pulling at the scar across his neck, “Put your sword up now that you’re done, and off with you.”</p>
<p>But she doesn’t want to go home, hasn’t wanted to since her brother died. The house lies empty at the end of the road, between the blacksmith and the rice field. Her father’s despair chills the house from behind his closed door.  </p>
<p>However, that’s not anything she can say to Sensei. She bows again, puts the sword away and scampers off, heart tight as she wonders what she will scrounge for dinner.</p>
<p>The next morning, she puts on her rattiest cloths and heads for the rice fields. The grains hang fat on their stalks, it’s time to harvest. The grimace on her face twists its testament to her opinion on squelching around in the muck. She wiggles her toes in their sandals, feels the water, mud and the leaf-refuse float around them. But it’s as her aunty says, ‘somebody’s got to do it’.</p>
<p>Her father hunches in the field next to her, his single arm moving up and down each branch, carefully peeling grain away from the plant. It’s hungry work, but Yorimatsu, Yorikashi and cousin Nanase all bear the duty with her, whiling away the day under the glower of the sun.</p>
<p>Afterwards all four run to the empty storehouse that serves as their classroom. Kaito stands at the front of the room, tapping his foot as they rush in and take their places. Haia at the front of the room, the brother’s yori at the back with rat-face while Nanase sits somewhere between them.</p>
<p>The screens lie open, presentation the guts of the building to the blinding day, but even so the students inside sprawl in the soupy humidity as Kaito stands at the front, back straight, painstakingly drawing out each Kanji. Most of the students struggle not to fall asleep, Haia sits riveted as two doors she did not know existed creak open before her: reading, writing. </p>
<p>Their lesson is interrupted mid-water. A loud creak issues forth from the rafters as two men jump onto the roof and down into the building.  Kaito-sensei curses at the mark marring ‘shui’.</p>
<p>“Kaito-san, did you forget what day it was?” asks the short bald one.</p>
<p>The taller one, long-bodied like a weasel, stands back and crosses his arms. </p>
<p>Kaito rubs his scar and turns his face from the men, but Haia sees him bare his teeth, “No, we were just finishing up,” he says as he erases the character, “We start here tomorrow, dismissed.”</p>
<p>Most of the class packs up in quite jubilation, Haia glares at the men with enough violence to draw weasels’ attention. He grins, she scrunches her face and turns her head. </p>
<p>Oh well, she thinks as she skips home to scratch the words of the day into the dirt before her house. Her new ritual keeps her in practice, and gives her an excuse not to go in till dark.</p>
<p>As the sun falls behind the horizon she creeps inside and sets the last of the rice to boil, cuts the bitter-melon from her aunt’s garden and seasons it with the all that’s left of the fermented bean sauce. She sighs and wonders if she can convince her father to get more.</p>
<p>Heavy footsteps sound as people tread across the porch. Clack-clack-clack sounds the door as someone knocks on it. Haia drops her spoon and opens the door.</p>
<p>Sensei stands with baldy and the weasel, she bows, Sensei rubs his scar, “No need to trouble this house then. This is one of my students.”</p>
<p>The creak behind her sends the hair on the back of her neck to alert. Her father, she tries to shut the door. He rarely goes out.</p>
<p>“Haia, who’s at the door?”</p>
<p>“Ah, nobody father.”</p>
<p>“Just recruitment officers sir, nothing for you to worry about,” says weasel lazily.</p>
<p>Haia feels her stomach drop and a disorienting fear that tells her to get-out-get-out, her father smells like alcohol and his temper brushes against her nerves, she steps out of the way as he barges to the door and yanks it open.</p>
<p>“Recruit- recruitment, wasn’t my own arm enough? Wasn’t my son?” he’s started yelling, their neighbors crack open their doors and quickly shut them, “Now you want my daughter.”</p>
<p>Haia, at the crack of the window sees Sensei frown and weasel swallow, only baldy seems unaffected by her father’s tumultuous display, “Sir, we generally don’t recruit women. Good-day.”</p>
<p>The leave quickly after that. Haia hands her father his dinner in a stupor. He doesn’t’ even look at her as he takes his meal, just shuffles into his room and shuts the door. Haia cries herself to sleep that night. But she goes to lessons that afternoon after harvest.</p>
<p>Kaito-sense frowns at her as she marches resolutely through the door and takes her usual spot, but says nothing, choosing instead to throw speculative glances her way the whole afternoon.</p>
<p>She hopes to squeeze out of the room before he can talk to her, but no such luck. He cuts her off deftly before she can slide between two desks.</p>
<p>“Haia-kun, uh, Haia-chan. I don’t…” he rethinks what needs to be said and pulls his shoulders back, “Haia-chan, the clan generally does not train women in the shinobi arts. It would be best if you do not come tomorrow.”</p>
<p>Haia tries to push the dread in her stomach down. She can’t not train. She feels tears begin to tickle her eyes, and blinks rapidly to stop them, inhaling and exhaling.</p>
<p>“Sensei,” she tries through her panic, “Boy or girl, I can bring honor and glory to the clan. I don’t understand why it matters.”</p>
<p>Kaito-sensei stumbles and rubs his scar while looking around furtively, “Look, it matters. Not to you, but to other people,” he peers around again. Once he had thought it mattered too, but years as Ayumu’s friend had beat that assumption out of his head. But how to explain the generations of convention that she was asking about?</p>
<p>He pauses, looks down at her, and decides promptly not to have that conversation at all. </p>
<p>He settles for, “Life’s not fair.”</p>
<p>“Of course life’s not fair,” she begins to tear up. A fair life would mean food on her table, a living mother, an attentive father, her brother’s love.</p>
<p>“Women have other duties!” he tries to explain as he feels anxious butterflies tumble in his stomach, “like-” child rearing, cooking and cleaning (which he is sure she already does, on top of her training and work in the fields).</p>
<p>“Sensei, please don’t take this away from me. If you do, it will be me in that house all by myself with Dad and the room that he throws our food and money into,” she begins to sob at the thought. She can’t go back to it, to drudging between that house and the fields, between the back breaking labor of farm work and her father’s pervading despair. </p>
<p>“What will Yorimatsu and Yorikashi do without me? Sensei,” she stares up at him with her dark-water eyes, “what will you do without me. I am your best student!”</p>
<p>Kaito looks down at her, sees the line of her collar-bone and her elbows poking holes through her skin. Notices the fraying edges of her garments and the way she flinches when some of other instructors shout too loudly or too near. He knows the signs of neglect, sees them often enough.</p>
<p>“Haia, it would be unusual,” he hedges, because she is right. She is his best student, and he likes her.</p>
<p>“But Nanase-san practices.”</p>
<p>“Nanase-chan is Ayumu’s student.”</p>
<p>Her shoulders drop as silent sobs begin too shaker her body. Perhaps her father was right, maybe she really will be nothing. Nothing, like her mother and brother. Nothing, like the hole in his chest that her father dumps all his emotions into.</p>
<p>Next to her, the idea of an apprentice sets a rabbit running down the course of Uchiha Kaito’s mind, and a pack of greyhounds raise their noses in its wake. His thoughts turn inward, to young-Haia’s determination and her work ethic, for she stays later than any of the other students (perhaps he thinks, to avoid going home). He thinks of her quick wit and her ability to master new concepts, and he remembers that hint of grace in that most basic of katas. </p>
<p>Haia sits heavily on the wooden floor, heedless of the grime on the floor and the unsettled dust whirling around her.</p>
<p>He says, “You will be my apprentice.”</p>
<p>Her screwed face as she looks up at him says she does not believe him, “Really?”</p>
<p>He takes a moment, wondering if his actions will come back to bite him. He has spent most of his life avoiding responsibility, instead throwing himself into combat. But his gimp leg has reordered his life. </p>
<p>Will he regret this? Probably? Is that going to stop him? He swallows and rubs his scar. No.</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>She wipes her nose on her sleeve and stares up at him, “Are you sure?”</p>
<p>Of course he’s not sure, “Stop asking questions before I change my mind!”</p>
<p>“Yes sensei!”</p>
<p>She goes home and falls into the sleep of the dead and wakes in the morning cautiously cheerful.</p>
<p>Not much changes in her day to day. She still spends half the day helping her father and other laborers in the fields, though the work wanes with the summer. She still trains with the boys, still mostly sits in the middle of the pack.</p>
<p>The biggest changes come when Kaito-sensei announces that she is in-fact a girl. </p>
<p>Rat face scowls at her and says, “I knew something was wrong with you.”</p>
<p>He body checks her as he walks by, and she lets him, but from then on in combat lessons he tries his hardest to hurt her.</p>
<p> Other boys try to beat her, but Rat-face seems to want to make her suffer. Unsurprising, given his sour disposition and overabundant jealously.</p>
<p>“I can’t believe Kaito-sensei took someone as useless as you as a student.”</p>
<p>Haia tries to hide how much the words hurt her. The word useless bites, and she knows that she mustn’t waste the opportunity she’s been given.</p>
<p>The bigger blow comes when the brother’s Yori shuffle their way away from her side at lunch in favor of their vitriolic classmate.</p>
<p>“Haia, you lied to us,” says Yorikashi with a slow frown.</p>
<p>“I didn’t mean too. I’m the same, I swear.”</p>
<p>“No, you’re a girl,” Yorimatsu says as he shrugs, “maybe when you’ve gotten this out of your head we can marry.”</p>
<p>Haia turns her back on them unable articulate just how meaningless that is to her.</p>
<p>“Marry? Who’d want to marry you!” she says through puckered lips.</p>
<p>But they’ve already sat next to Rat-face with their backs to her.</p>
<p>She eats alone for a few days wondering at how she’s already lost the few friends she had. Wasn’t continuing to train supposed to stop that? She shifts uneasily and tries not to let the loneliness spill out of her. </p>
<p>She shuffles to training ground non-the-less. The boys behind her throw sand in her hair and whisper terrible things to her back, but she ignores them, migrating closer to the corner each day. </p>
<p>The front corner, let it never be said that Haia sits in the back. </p>
<p>The next day, her cousin Nanase sits at the beginning of the row and on kenjutsu-Monday she practices a few feet away. By the end of the week they’ve bumped elbows three times and sat with each other twice for silent-snack-time.</p>
<p>Then Haia, tired of pretense asks, “Do you even like me?”</p>
<p>Next to her, Nanase puts her rice ball down and stares beyond Haia’s shoulder. The look unnerves Haia if only because Nanase’s face tends to rest in an unapproachable scowl, and her poker face makes Haia’s skin crawl.</p>
<p>Nanase finally smirks at her and shrugs, “Don’t know yet.”</p>
<p>And Haia, whose mobile face constantly twitches to betray her emotions can only roll her eyes and scowl, hurt and angry and tired of being taken for granted, “Well, while you make up your mind, I’m going to sit under that tree,” she stands, pats her worn pants of dust and huffs, “by myself.”</p>
<p>Nanase scowls at her over her onigiri, but doesn’t move to follow. Later, as they both walk home, twelve feet apart, Nanase finally breaks the silence, “That’s not what I meant.”</p>
<p>“What didn’t you mean?”</p>
<p>“I mean; I want to be friends.”</p>
<p>Haia stops her fierce trek home. Nanase trots a few paces a head of her and stops, as if tugged back. Haia notices the girl’s slumped shoulders, and her plodding gait. Could she be?</p>
<p>“I thought we were enemies, I thought you didn’t like me.”</p>
<p>“I thought the same. But, well.” She shrugs.</p>
<p>Shame steals over Haia, “I didn’t know. You always glare.”</p>
<p>Nanase scowls and blinks, “That’s just how my face is.”</p>
<p>“Oh,” Haia grimaces and says stiltedly, “I’m sorry.”</p>
<p>“You’re not good at this are you?” sighs Nanase.</p>
<p>Affronted Haia points out, “You aren’t either. But, but I would be honored to have you as a friend,” she even bows.</p>
<p>“You’re weird,” says Nanase though a hesitant smile. </p>
<p>“So’re you.”</p>
<p>Few constants follow Haia through life, the ficklest of them all calls itself war. One of the others is her cousin Nanase. Nanase is seven, Haia, halfway there. If Haia had been born less wise, or under a more envious star they never would have bridged the gap of family to become friends. </p>
<p>But as it stands, Nanase’s solemnity matches Haia’s brashness, her rationality sits well with Haia’s dreaminess and her lack of humor suits Haia’s sass. </p>
<p>It helps that both prefer to argue over the philosophy of the Fire sages than to do each other’s hair (though when you can do both, why choose).  A year passes.</p>
<p>One days Nanase’s widowed mother takes one look and comments, “You two almost make a complete person. Now one of you needs to cultivate some practicality.”</p>
<p>Haia opens her mouth for a quick retort, and then thinks better of it, “What’s cultivate?”</p>
<p>“It means to develop, improve or grow,” the older woman says as she grins down on Haia and shakes her head.</p>
<p>“I need to cultivate a lot of things then, and really I don’t know what you are talking about Uchiha-san, (Haia calls all of the Uchiha matriarchs Uchiha-san) but I am very practical.”</p>
<p>“My dear, nobody your age is practical.”</p>
<p>Haia, too ‘practical’ (and self-satisfied with her own logic) to argue, only smirks and shrugs her shoulders. Nanase’s mother sends them out with a wave and a smile framed by frown lines. </p>
<p>The two girls go to the only place where two young combatants can go: the training ground. </p>
<p>They stick out, most of the other competitors are young boys who shun the scrawny corner, but Haia and Nanase practice with each other. And when the comments and the glares get to be too much they move to the edge of the compound. The forest offers respite, and after their bouts they practice stealth, following deer trails and playing in the hollows of trees. </p>
<p>Both are too young to have garnered any sort of mastery with a weapon, but already Ayumu’s apprentice shows skill with genjutsu, and even more importantly, imagination. </p>
<p>Her peers praise her, the instructors shake their head that a woman might have any talent, and Haia can only sit at the sidelines and hope for any sort of aptitude to spill fourth from her. But alas, while she can devour text books, out argue her peers, spin logical circles around her class mates, and outsmart the boys she faces, Haia does not ever find her knack for bloodshed.</p>
<p>She can do it, just not well.  </p>
<p>Then they finally begin teaching them the theory behind chakra control, and much to the chagrin of Rat-faced Rin and his Yori-cronies, Haia has the beginnings of formidable control. </p>
<p>Which only enhances the anxiety she feels when training with Kaito-sensei. When she practices in front of him each step slams into the other, her body sways in the manner of drunkard, her shoulders stand to attention and her breathing never matches her steps. She keeps herself up at night worrying about how long sensei will train a failure.</p>
<p>Kaito-sensei notices all her flaws too, she knows, he just never points them out to her.</p>
<p>Instead he shows her what to do again and again, until she wants to throw her practice sword across the room and stomp off. She never does. Instead, she hefts the wooden sword and practices until her calluses have calluses. </p>
<p>Then when sensei goes to train his other student, a noble from the main house, she practices more. And by herself, her shoulders fall, her fear of failure diminishes, her steps link, she forgets herself, and practice flows.</p>
<p>If only she could show him, she laments.</p>
<p>But she’s just not good enough.</p>
<p>And yet, as ill prepared as she is, her family sends her into combat. They care more for her gender than her age, but she wields a kunai ably, so they let that slide too. She does not remember the motivation behind her first mission, nor the objective. </p>
<p>The scroll simply says: courier.</p>
<p>She has no idea what that means, so she takes it to sensei at the main house. </p>
<p>Social status divides the Uchiha compound, but all civilian families, like hers, live nested within the confines of Shinobi barracks. All young men spend time in these houses, living with their brothers.  </p>
<p>Small square one-to-two-room houses define the area she grew up in, and though well loved, often signs of neglect take hold. As she travels inward, to the true center, artisans and craftspeople take the next neighborhood, and the sounds of the cries of their wares often fill this section of the compound. Then, finally, in the middle of the nest, like a safeguarded yolk: the nobility.</p>
<p>Haia doesn’t often have a need to travel to the center of the compound, her life revolves between her house next to the blacksmith, the raining ground and the rice fields.  Training, farming, playing with Nanase, that is her life. Anxiety travels with her inward. All the houses have terra-cotta roof tile painted green, and the doors lie easy in their frames, no crooked lintels and worn down tatami in sight. </p>
<p>Trepidation tells her to stop and turn around, but instinct tells her to follow the sun. Instinct leads her well, for she finds Kaito-sensei, a hearth-fire on her consciousness, easily. She almost pats herself on the back, and then watches him.</p>
<p>Her eyebrows crawl up her head, first in jealousy- for he’s training a boy, and then in shock, the boy swings his blade so well! She taps down the envy crawling up her throat. Haia wants his skill the way a dehydrated man in the desert wants water. </p>
<p>She wonders at the boy, his fluff of long hair and his pouty lips. What does she have to do to be that good? </p>
<p>Sensei cuts off her thoughts, “That’s enough, you’ve been practicing I see.”</p>
<p>Practice it is, she nods to herself as she sneaks away. She can find sensei and ask him about courier later. She has to practice. </p>
<p>Later that night as she tries to fall asleep she feels her heart beat to the boy’s movements. Thump, her heart, as his foot shifts and his blade slices through the air. Thump, as he turns his torso and raises his blade in an imaginary block. </p>
<p>Courier, she learns the next day when she reports for her mission, means message runner. Her captain, a thin-faced bald man nicknamed Aka, tells her as they run to their camp.</p>
<p>“Your job will be to relay messages from the base to the front. The enemy has sensors. Can you mask your chakra?”</p>
<p>“It’s one of the first things they teach us.”</p>
<p>He looks down on her and smiles, “That doesn’t mean you know how to do it.”</p>
<p>“I can do it,” she nods for emphasis.</p>
<p>She catches the first scroll of the morning with her face and grimaces as Aka laughs at her. The grace of the start matches the grace of the day. She spends most of the afternoon hiding her chakra signature and crawling around the underbrush, avoiding older nin as they sweep across the terrain.</p>
<p>She doesn’t remember much, just the smell of the earth, the light filtering through the vegetation, the blur of men’s faces as they jump past her on the tree road. The only thing she does remember is the look of hesitation on an older nin’s face when he accidentally stumbles on her. </p>
<p>Haia scooches back on her bottom. He shuts his eyes and slices the air. Haia leaps foreword and under the blade rather than away. That’s when sees the opening, but cannot act on it. </p>
<p>Someone else does, and Aka later says, “That’s the first time I’ve seen him hesitate,” he laughs and adds, “and the last.” </p>
<p>As Aka walks away he ruffles her hair. The mission, from some-lord-or-another, lies in its death throws. The rival faction has been retreating for the better part of the month. So her first mission ends a week after she arrives.</p>
<p>She returns thinner and loses her smile for a few days. </p>
<p>There is blood on her sleeve, and her right bicep needs stitches from a stray kunai, but she is alive. </p>
<p>Her father bursts into tears when he sees her and pulls her in for a hug. For a moment she thinks he will ask her not to go out again, that he will demand she remain in the compound behind the relative safety of their walls. </p>
<p>But no, the loss of a wife and son prevent him from keeping his young daughter from avenging them. </p>
<p>That night she falls asleep next to her cousin, after vomiting in the ditch behind the field where they grow their crops. Nanase lies wane next to her. Limp, with shallow breath, more a doll than a girl.</p>
<p>“I killed someone yesterday.”</p>
<p>Whereas the day before the thought would have provoked endless chasing jealously, Haia, who knows the splatter of blood at her feet, who can recognize what it was to sit in the mud and hear the scuttling throws of death, knows better. </p>
<p>“… Do you want to talk about it?”</p>
<p>Her cousin lets out a sob, and maybe a wordless moan. Haia can only hug her from behind. They fall asleep like that, but not before Nanase whispers it out. </p>
<p>“He cornered me, said I was a gutless Uchiha and deserved to die. He his hands around my neck and tried to strangle me. But he was close enough for me to stick a kunai in him.”</p>
<p>They sit in their silence. The crickets chirp around them, and Haia can smell mud from the rice patties.</p>
<p> Nanase says, “It does not feel like we won.”</p>
<p>“No,” says Haia, “Everybody lost.”</p>
<p>Life goes on and the endless fighting. Not even the wealthiest of them all are immune to the loss of loved ones.</p>
<p>Haia, practicing by herself in the woods, witnesses Tajima-dono’s pale face and shaking shoulders as they bring home his oldest son. The body is swathed in a fallen battle flag, black on red. She can’t see the blood.</p>
<p>His shoulders shake raggedly, his surviving sons stand in his shadow, he bows over them, puts an arm on each.</p>
<p>The familiar bitter-silent anguish of a father. Anxiety rises in her heart; her own weary father lies listlessly in his room no doubt. But Tajima-dono rises, back straight and dries his tears. He leads the procession back to the main house, unbowed, but even from her great distance and hidden behind a copse of trees, she knows his churning sorrow.</p>
<p>And then one day, as she and Nanase practice genjutsu (as Nanase practices genjutsu on her), she sees someone dark haired and small streak past their practice spot towards the fence. A kid! </p>
<p>She doesn’t even think.</p>
<p>“Where are you going? Don’t you know it’s dangerous out there?”</p>
<p>The figure turns, his eyebrows shoot up and his smile lurches awkwardly, “uh, Girls,” he says in equal parts shock and disgust, “What are you doing out here?”</p>
<p>Haia scowls at him, this pretty boy with his fluff of hair, “What are you doing out here?”</p>
<p>He sidles closer to the fence pouting at them, as if it will make them go away, “Nothing.”</p>
<p>Haia follows him, from behind his tuft of hair looks familiar, “That’s funny, cause it looks like you’re trying to sneak out.”</p>
<p>He turns back to her, flushes and stomps, “No! Of course not.”</p>
<p>Nanase, walks to him silently and peers out into the woods, reiterating Haia’s earlier statement she almost whispers, “It’s dangerous out there.”</p>
<p>Frustrated he growls, “No its not” and moves a rock, revealing a child sized hole in a slat of an otherwise impenetrable wall. And Haia, who has dreamed of adventuring out of the bounds of their small world can only gape at him in wonder.</p>
<p>She crawls out after him.</p>
<p>“What are you doing?”</p>
<p>“I’m coming with you.”</p>
<p>He pouts, “No you’re not.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” she says, “I am.”</p>
<p>“Haia,” says Nanase with a fist full of her clothing, “It is dangerous.”</p>
<p>But the lure is too sweet, Haia scents the air free of the stifle of the compound, “I’ll be back by dinner.”</p>
<p>The boy sighs- a big inhale followed by woofing exhale, “Fine, but don’t hold me up.”</p>
<p>She scoffs, and the only reason she doesn’t hold him back is because he leaves her behind. She does not know this, but the boy is far better trained than she and has already learned how to integrate chakra into his leaps and bounds. She stood no chance but beats herself up for it regardless. She can, however, follow a trail. And so finds him later, sullenly throwing rocks through the growing shadows and into the Naka river. </p>
<p>“You found me,” he pouts.</p>
<p>Haia, panting, scowls and says, “Of course I found you, you leave a trail a blind man can follow.”</p>
<p>“I do not!” his voice pitches in outrage.</p>
<p>But Haia has already turned to the bend in the creek. The late afternoon sunlight glints orange off the ripples, and the gentle chatter of water along the banks lulls her to sit down.</p>
<p>“Why are we here?”</p>
<p>The boy flops down beside her, “I was looking for my brother.”</p>
<p>“Your brother? Why is he out here?” She asks as she tosses a pebble into the water and watch the ripples drift away in the current.</p>
<p>The boy pouts, Haia is beginning to realize this boy does a lot of pouting. So she is unsurprised when he pouts again, but what shocks her is what he says, “What would a peasant farmer know about brotherhood?”</p>
<p>“Hey,” Haia is not sure if she is more insulted by the peasant farmer comment, or the implication that she might not know about the trials of siblingship, “I had a brother!” </p>
<p>Her brother was great, he answered her questions, helped her mom cook dinner, he held her hand, and told her bed-time stories. Haia feels a tear leak out, she scrubs her face forcefully and finished, “he is dead.”</p>
<p>The ire goes out of him, “Yeah. Mine too.”</p>
<p>Haia rubs her eyes and squeezes them shut, then opens them and closes them once more for good measure, “Well it sounds like you have one that is still alive.”</p>
<p>“Not for much longer if he keeps coming to play at this stupid river,” growls the the boy, looking away from her.</p>
<p>“That doesn’t-” but she stops dead. She hears the clank of armor knocking against itself and the heavy tread of booted-careless feet walking.</p>
<p>The boy, a noble for sure, peers into the growing dark behind her and puts a finger to his lips. He then tries to leap into the trees with chakra, but something primal in Haia cries out, a survival instinct that tells her to be as discrete as possible. Five of them, to the southwest. Something deep inside of her recognizes that these men will sense the flash of chakra for what it is, so she yanks the boy down before he can try. He must see something in her eye, for he doesn’t protest.</p>
<p>Instead she grabs his arm and pulls him towards a game trail. Deer make silent work of the forest, so it stands to reason that two children following their trails should too. They crouch down and slink through the undergrowth, while the grown men stumble around in it, breaking branches and tripping over rocks.</p>
<p>“Quiet, or they will know we are here,” says one.</p>
<p>Another, farther away says, “I should have brought the dogs. We should have brought someone with a summon.”</p>
<p>“Use your own nose,” says a third, “those kids have got to be around here somewhere.</p>
<p>Haia watches the goose flesh travel up her arm, but they continue sneaking away. They tiptoe around mossy rocks, the boy helps her up a too steep cliff, yet they never seem to shake the men clanking around behind them. </p>
<p>Then Haia sees the rotten husk of an old tree. Gesturing wildly to Izuna she tests the strength of a branch and then pulls herself up and up and up to where the hollow begins, and then crawls down-down, till she rests with her knees in the dirt and her eye line just above the boys booted feet. He follows quickly, and they find themselves jammed together, knee to knee, his elbow pokes her side, her boney hip juts into this thigh. They don’t care, in unison their breath slows, they pull their chakra inward. Haia hears the crunch of dry leaf under boots and grabs the boys hand, he squeezes it in return.</p>
<p>In the light of the newly risen moon she sees large booted feet move across the glade, she can feel each careless thump as a reverberation in the earth. Four sets of boots follow. Five men for two children.</p>
<p>“I’m sure they went this way.”</p>
<p>“How can you tell?”</p>
<p>“The trail, clever of them to use the game track, it made them harder to follow.”</p>
<p>“Did someone send for the dogs.”</p>
<p>Haia breaks out into a cold sweat.</p>
<p>A twig snaps, “Should be here soon.”</p>
<p>They boy squeezes her hand so hard she feels it might fall off, but she doesn’t care.</p>
<p>“Butsuma-sama will be pleased.”</p>
<p>Then a growl, the dogs! Haia pushes herself into the boy’s side, “Wait, did you hear that?”</p>
<p>A creaking grind follows, later that sound will become second nature, the slow slide of a sword from a sheath, but in this moment, the curious noise only makes hear heart beat faster. </p>
<p>Then something whistles and thumps, a man screams, she hears clacking and a distant whoosh. The boy next to her shifts, crawls closer to the crack between the root and the ground. Curious Haia draws nearer as well. A fire burns at the edge of the glade throwing much of the chaos into focus. She closes her eyes when the last man dies.</p>
<p>“Where are they?” growls a fuming voice in the dark. </p>
<p>Something lower to the ground steps out of the shadows. She makes the clean lean lines of a long-legged-short-haired-pointy-eared dog.</p>
<p>“In the tree.”</p>
<p>The boy has scampered up, leaving Haia to climb up after, but the both poke their heads out of the tree hollow at more or less the same time, and proceed to peer at the cluster below them. And despite it all, despite the fear of loss and the stench of blood, two of the men smile at the innocence of the picture.</p>
<p>The boy jumps down first and runs to the stern faced man who spoke, it takes Haia a few moments to find the resemblance, but when she does she can’t unsee it. He bends down looks into the boy’s eyes and ruffles his hair. When he straightens to look at her she recognizes the clan head. Shocked, she drops from the tree and into a kowtow. This means that the boy is one of his sons. Haia feels her face heat up, she was so improper to him (as Nanase’s mother would say).</p>
<p>One of the men approaches as Haia unbends, “Izuna says you don’t have much chakra control.”</p>
<p>Haia nods, it’s true, the teachers at the training ground refuse to teach her on principal, much of what she knows is self-taught.</p>
<p>“How did you get up that tree then?”</p>
<p>Haia doesn’t know this, but her raised brows, narrowed eyes and pressed lips combined to make one of the most incredulous looks the young man has ever seen. </p>
<p>She says, “I climbed,” and walks away shaking her head.</p>
<p>Laughing, he jogs after her, “Wait now young miss. I have been instructed to carry you back.”</p>
<p>He turns around and gestures for her to climb onto his back, which she does, and soon they fly through the trees. Its rather exciting for Haia, who vows to learn to do this next. Ayumu-sensei has said she had great chakra control, after all. She hugs the young man tighter, missing her brother and his piggy-back rides all the more.</p>
<p>It turns out the young man is one Hikaku. Haia almost pulls them both over in her attempt to climb off him. His family is an offshoot of the main house, far above her own social stature. The young boy, Izuna-sama she reminds herself, was spot on when he called her a peasant farmer.</p>
<p>The young man drops her off at her father’s house. She can make out the flickering light of a candle inside and when she opens the door, her father’s forlorn face greets her. He pulls her into a gruff hug immediately, letting Nanase peak her head out from behind him. Haia can make out Nanase’s mother puttering about in the kitchen. </p>
<p>And that, she expects, is the end of that. No way anybody from the main branch would be interested in her.</p>
<p>Training goes on. Haia incrementally gets better with combat, but she lurches foreword with the rest of the pack, indistinguishable from it. She can climb a tree faster than her year-mates, but only reluctantly infuses her blows with chakra.</p>
<p>This frustrates her to no end, and the tiny voice in the back of her head gets louder, it whispers useless. </p>
<p>But the part of her that threw-up after her first battle (the part that she refuses to acknowledge) is glad. </p>
<p>Haia, you see, does not want to be a killer (too bad she doesn’t recognize this). </p>
<p>But while her battle skills stall, she shines a light on everyone’s day’, or so her cousin says.</p>
<p>She teases the illusionist, heckles the old arms instructor, and runs happy circles around the hoard of cousins that make it to the training ground. She even manages to make sour old Tajima-sama cough a laugh when she flings a live trout at cousin Hikaku after a particularly successful chakra fishing trip with sensei. Hikaku just thanks her for his dinner with a cheeky grin.</p>
<p>It’s sometime between this stunt and her eighth birthday that Izuna steps back into her life. Literally. He steps out of between two trees while Haia and Nanase stand below the spreading branches of an oak, contemplating how mime it.</p>
<p>“I think you have to spread your chakra evenly across your skin,” says Haia, while balanced on one foot. </p>
<p>She places it on the tree and feels her chakra match the roughness of the bark beneath her feet, “Then you make your skin tree-textured by using your chakra to mimic the bark.”</p>
<p>“You’re doing it wrong,” says the boy –Izuna, Izuna-sama.</p>
<p>Haia ducks into a bow, stumbling into it from one foot, followed immediately by Nanase.</p>
<p>The boy walks through the clearing and stands before them. If either bothered to look up they would note his scrunched brow and irritated frown. </p>
<p>They don’t, Haia might make discreetly bad decisions with respect to her sense of humor, but even she knows you don’t just make friends with the second son of the head of the clan. </p>
<p>“Well, what are you going to do about it?” Izuna-sama demands.</p>
<p>“Do what about what Izuna-sama?” demurs Nanase, because while Haia can get away with things because of her charm and her wit, Nanase is already demonstrating the keen skills as a manipulator. </p>
<p>“Don’t call me that!”</p>
<p>Haia, picking up on his irritation can’t help herself, “Call you what… Izuna-sama?”</p>
<p>He huffs, and he puffs, and he grits out, “That.”</p>
<p>“Is Izuna-sama saying he does not like to be called Izuna-sama?” Haia says through a laugh, peaking up at him from her bow.</p>
<p>“No I do not.”</p>
<p>“Okay, then does Izuna-sama prefer Izuna-dono?”</p>
<p>He fairly shrieks, “No!”</p>
<p>Haia unbends and grins at him from her knees, “Ok- ok,” capitulating she says, “Izuna-kun? Izuna-chan?”</p>
<p>They grimace at each other, kun, neither likes the sound of it.</p>
<p>“Just call me Izuna-san,” he says. Haia suppresses a grin, while Nanase gapes slack jawed.</p>
<p>“Alright, Izuna-san. Call me Haia-san,” she almost stumbles at the gall, to propose herself his equal. She feels her stomach erupt with butterflies and glances at him from the corner of her eye.</p>
<p>But he surprises her and grins. She can’t help it; she returns the smile hesitantly.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Oak</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Haia and Izuna train, get used to the front and return to the oak tree.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>For an awkward moment all three lull in the silence of it-isn’t-done. Perhaps older children or young adults would have listened to that silence. As it stands, they are too young to heed it. Nanase desperately wants to learn, Haia hungers for friendship and Izuna has a lonely pit of hunger lying in his stomach, turned savage after the death of his oldest brother.</p><p>It is Nanase who breaks the silence, “So, how do you pretend to be a tree?”</p><p>And then Haia says, “And maybe nature manipulation next?”</p><p>And so Izuna teaches them transformation and for Haia, it marks the birth of a lifelong friendship.</p><p>For Nanase, Izuna is high enough in the social pecking order to dismiss much of the stigma around females in battle. </p><p>Tajima, for his part, only blinks at the passing complaints of his advisers. He is less inclined to dismiss anything based solely on gender, and when he looks at the wild one all he sees is the young woman who saved his son’s life.</p><p>It helps that when he peers at the two girls with his sharingan all he sees is latent talent. </p><p>If he can use it, then he is happy to train it. He glances at the wind bag before him, “Shut it Fubuki.”</p><p>Kaito-sensei preens, “Now I can train my two cute-students at once.”</p><p>Haia pulls at her newly cut hair, it tries to curl, but its’s shaved close to her skin, “I’m not cute,” she scowls up at him. </p><p>Kaito laughs down at her, she’s adorable, but knows better than to say that.</p><p>Izuna rolls his eyes and smirks, “I’m cute.”</p><p>“Well, cuteness won’t stop blades. Child-hunting squads are hand selected and trained to be vicious. So you’ll just have to be better. Izuna-kun, practice the fifth form, I’ll keep an eye on you. Haia, today you will learn the fourth.”</p><p>Haia can’t decide if she likes practice with Izuna-san or not. As the clan heads son, he gets much more attention than she, naturally. Yet she’s already learned so much just by watching him. She watches his grace and envy slides into her, and the comparisons.</p><p>“Lift your arms higher before you slice down, feet wider, steps slower, yes. Now do that sequence again,” says Kaito-sensei with one eye on Izuna.</p><p>Haia lowers her sword to guard and begins again. Left foot slides forward with a low block, support the weight on her right and then turn the block into a strike, three steps back and the two foreword with two strikes. High block, strike, low block, and then a long vertical slice. </p><p>“Good,” he says “Again.”</p><p>Izuna pauses in his training and turns to Haia, frowning for a moment. He finds himself admiring the sliver of her blade as she cuts through the sunlight streaming in from the open door. </p><p>“Again.”</p><p>Izuna turns around and steps forward slicing up. The forth form had been difficult for him to grasp, but Haia has already stitched together the first section. His eyes narrow as he repeats the last movement.</p><p>By the end of training Haia lies arms akimbo on the cool floor. Izuna stands over her and offers her sip of water. </p><p>“Sensei, why does Haia look so good when she practices and so bad when she fights me?”</p><p>Behind him Kaito wants to smack the back of the boy’s head. Haia, meanwhile has turned onto her stomach and folded over herself.</p><p>“Haia-chan just needs to work on her confidence,” Kaito grinds out, he has known about Haia’s issues with self-worth and has been trying to work her through them. He doubts having her flaws pointed out so easily is what she needs though. </p><p>Kaito gives in to his desires and whacks the boy on the back of his head. Gently, of course, he is the clan-head’s son. </p><p>“Ow.”</p><p>Haia grabs the offered water, sits up, and turns to the far corner. On the other side of the wall someone’s footsteps squeak as they traverse the hall. Izuna and Kaito follow the person’s progress but Haia has already turned around to put her practice sword away.</p><p>Almost dismissively she says, “That’s Hikaku-sama, he probably has a message for one of you.”</p><p>Izuna snorts at her and flicks water in her face, “okay Miss Fortune teller.”</p><p>The door behind them slides open and Hikaku says, “Message for you Kaito-san.”</p><p>Haia turns to catch the end of the young man’s bow to Izuna before his exit.</p><p>Izuna scowls down at Haia as she sticks her tongue out at him. Behind them Kaito opens his scroll.</p><p>“How did you know that?”</p><p>Haia shrugs and stands, “I knew it was Hikaku because,” she shrugs again and waggles her fingers at him, “well, you know, and I know that Hikaku sometimes runs messages for your dad- father… So I just guessed.”</p><p>Izuna frowns down at her, “I don’t” he mimes her, waggling his fingers in front of her face, “know. What does that mean?”</p><p>Behind them Kaito puts down his scroll and frowns, “It means that Haia’s a sensor.”</p><p>“A Sensor?” says Izuna as Haia asks, “A what?”</p><p>Izuna eyes her speculatively, as Kaito-sensei pauses to consider his answer, then he says, “It means you can feel chakra, and are sensitive enough to it to tell the difference between different people’s chakras.”</p><p>“Yeah, but can’t everyone do that?”</p><p>Kaito-smiles down at her with quirked brows, “No, it’s actually quite rare in our clan. Which means I need to figure out how to train you…” he trails off, “I’ll have to do research,” he smiles at the prospect, and steeples his hands in anticipation.</p><p>Then he notes his two students, “I expect to see you both Saturday afternoon, I’ll have some assigned reading for you.”</p><p>Izuna groans as Haia claps her hands, “Yes!”</p><p>Kaito smiles down at her, “If only you both showed enthusiasm for learning.”</p><p>Izuna just sticks his tongue out.</p><p>None of the boys go out of their way to train with them, so the next day, Haia and Nanase find themselves facing off against one another in the yard. Haia, the taller of the two, has the advantage in hand to hand combat and swordsmanship. She often finds herself the victor in these bouts, and finds that she has built a solid understanding in how to fight people smaller than she. </p><p>However, the absence of general sparring partners leads to a dearth of knowledge with respect to fighting every other body type. </p><p>“Uerh,” exhales Nanase under her breath, ‘ew’ also works, thinks Haia as she watches Rin saunter over to them.</p><p>Nanase dusts herself off and puts her guard up, ignoring Rat-face and his two ganglia (otherwise known as the yori-brothers).</p><p>“Nanase-chan,” he greets and gives her a slow look up and down, “your guard is a little low, but other than that you have a strong stance.”</p><p>Haia raises her own arms to block her face and takes two measured steps forward, her back faces Rin’s twisted face.</p><p>“Haia’s sloppy, my mom thinks so,” he says with a sneer, she feels her anger growing in the pit of her stomach, “So if you want another partner, I’m here.”</p><p>Haia punches twice, Nanase guards herself well and kicks, Haia ducks, pops back up and rushes. Nanase falls, pulled down by imbalance from her own kick, but she gets back up quickly, back muddy. </p><p>Nanase throw two punches and a front kick, Haia jumps out of the way, but the hair on the back of her neck raises as she feels Rin (his chakra signature, she tells herself) at her back. She turns, but not fast enough to avoid the vicious punch he sends her way, nor his reaching hands as he pulls her by her hair down to her knees. </p><p>Haia’s brother had once told her that when people hurt on the inside they try to hurt other people on the outside. Rin must really be hurting on the inside, thinks Haia through her gritted teeth.</p><p>“You think you’re better than me, don’t you? You have a sensei, you like to read?” he says as he pushes her forehead into the dirt and breaths onto the back of her neck, “Well you’re nothing.”</p><p>His fingers in her hair pull at her scalp and she’s having trouble breathing because of the dirt in her nose, and with a little bit of fear she realizes that Rin wants to hurt her. But then anger grows from the pit of her, and she reaches behind her and tries to claw out Rat face’s eyes. He relents a little and she elbows him, breaking his nose.</p><p>The both rise with a cloud of dust. Haia’s hands clench by her side and Rat-face glares at her across the field with a freely bleeding nose.</p><p>Neither say anything else, she’s fed the fires of her anger with fear, and now its rises as a rage in her stomach. She’s tired of Rin, and of her father, and even of herself. </p><p>Rin raises his fists, Haia follows suite. They are the same height, both tall for their age, but Haia knows that Rin overpowers his opponents, and doesn’t often use his mind. </p><p>He charges, she jumps out of the way. He punches, she blocks. He charges again, and Haia trips him. He lands hard on his shoulder, and Haia takes advantage of him by kicking him in the gut, once, twice.</p><p>Yorikashi stops her from kicking him a third time.</p><p>“He’s down.”</p><p>Haia spits, “He didn’t yield.”</p><p>But she walks away huffing, with Nanase in her wake. </p><p>Later she will wonder at where that anger came from, will look at her actions with shame, but in that moment she sweats her own righteousness. She looks on Rat-face crouched on the training field, and she thinks, good.</p><p>In that moment she finds the white-hot self-righteous anger that motivates the revenge that drives her family to continue the killing. Her teachers view it as normal, as something to use. Enemies condemn it in others, but validate it in their own. </p><p>Hideki, the hand-to-hand instructor looks at her and says, “Good, next week you will be fighting Nori.”</p><p>That night she falls into an exhausted but anxious sleep. An angry version of herself chases her around her dream, and she stumbles through her farm chores the next morning. </p><p>She looks to Saturday for respite, but sensei has other plans, “Sensing, like smell and hearing, is a sense” </p><p>Izuna rolls his eyes and mutters, “Really Sensei?”</p><p>“It’s a sense!” he coughs and gather’s himself.</p><p>“Don’t worry sensei,” interjects Haia, “I am listening.”</p><p>“It is a sense that only a few are born with!” He pushes through the commentary, “We need to nurture it.”</p><p>Haia frowns, she knows how to nurture rice seedlings and potato sprouts, “How do you nurture a sense? And can you develop it without ‘being born’ with it?”</p><p>Sensei sighs, “If you would let me finish,” Izuna coughs a laugh at her and Haia only shrugs, “It has been known to develop in those who have been blinded later in life. To take the place of the lost sense of sight. And reading about that gave me an idea,” he says as he pulls out a blindfold.</p><p>“Are you kidding?”</p><p>He motions for her to turn by rotating his pointer finger in a circle. </p><p>Haia glares up at him, “What if I don’t want to?”</p><p>He pinches his brows and sighs. Last night an enthusiasm for new material overtook him and he found his way to bed much later than normal, “What if I stopped teaching you?”</p><p>“You promised you wouldn’t!”</p><p>“You made a promise to me too when you became my student, that you would learn what I have to teach you. Now turn around.”</p><p>“What do you want me to do?”</p><p>“Walk around and report to me at the end of the day.”</p><p>Haia frowns up at him, “Sensei, this is the main house. It would be improper for one as lowly as me,” she utters the last word in the way of somebody saying a thing by wrote.</p><p>Kaito mulls her over, “You are known as my student Haia-chan, you belong here.”</p><p>He wants to add, get it through your thick skull.</p><p>“I belong here,” she repeats, not sure if it’s true, and she turns she asks, “What will you be doing?”</p><p>Kaito-sensei wraps the blindfold around her head thrice, “Izuna will be learning to play the Biwa with the young lady Tamura-san.”</p><p>She’s surprised at how scared she feels without her eyes.</p><p>“Says who?” Asks an outraged Izuna, as Kaito ties the knot at the back of her head.</p><p>“You’re late mother.”</p><p>Behind her Izuna chokes, the blindfold also covers her ears, and diminishes her hearing for a moment. She resists the urge to claw at it and tear it off. She moves from foot to foot, nervously, her mother’s necklace bounce off her chest in the same rhythm. Tap tap tap, it says against her skin. Sensei’s footsteps pass her by and she hears the grind and clack of the door slide open.</p><p>“Off you go,” he says, behind her Izuna must pluck a string, a notes slides resentfully into the air, permeating the room. Haia swallows.</p><p>“Okay, here I go.”</p><p>As the door slides shut behind her she enters a new world. </p><p>Sometimes ghosts slide across her perception, or she calls them ghosts. She feels them in the room behind her. Familiar. Izuna, smaller, burns as bright as Sensei’s forge fire, and both give her confidence even with a door between them. Not ghosts. Chakra signatures. </p><p>How to describe something with presence that you cannot see? Are they warm like heat, do they vibrate like the strum of Izuna’s biwa?</p><p>She rubs at the blindfold. Now she must learn to differentiate the chakra from the person. Pull the sense known as sensing from all of her other senses. She doesn’t know the word, but Kaito-sensei thinks of it as a distillation. </p><p>Haia takes one step, and then another. She places her hand on the wall, feeling for the grain of the wood with her fingertips. </p><p>She doesn’t like it. She can’t tell where most people are because she doesn’t know them, and chakra swirls around everybody like the mottled spots that chase their way across closed eyes.</p><p>She runs into more than one person and perceives their irritation through their chakra more than their chakra itself. Haia’s fingers brush a door. She opens it, feels her way around. Soft, folds, ah, a linen cupboard. She closes the door and sits down, perfect.</p><p>Her respite lasts all of two minutes. Someone’s steps approach the door, it opens, a woman gasps and jumps. Someone else notices the ruckus and approaches, Haia can feel them as the stride across the hall. Their chakra runs thick and permeable into her little room. She recognizes it, though she can’t remember from where. </p><p>A man lets out a little laugh. She feels him wave the woman away. If only everybody had chakra signatures like this man. Sensing would be easy.</p><p>“Well. Explain yourself.”</p><p>Haia doesn’t really know what to say, so settles for, “I’m lost.”</p><p>The man, unperturbed, responds, “You’re wearing a blindfold.”</p><p>She shrugs, “I’m training to be a sensor.”</p><p>The man pauses, she takes a step back as his chakra seems to perceive her, “The clan needs sensors.”</p><p>She bows to him. Here I am, she seems to say. </p><p>Then she recognizes what the man says, he knows what the clan needs. That gets her attention.</p><p>She asks, “Does the clan need soldiers?”</p><p>The man’s crazy chakra whirls in the air about them, “The clan always needs soldiers.”</p><p>Haia pauses, tip of her tongue on the roof of her mouth, not really understanding what she means to say or feels. The thoughts spiraling behind her anxiety, her fear and self-recrimination don’t make themselves knows. </p><p>At the center of it all, she wants to ask, Why doesn’t the clan want me?</p><p>But she can’t find the words, or understand her nebulous thoughts.</p><p>But the man must comprehend something, perhaps he himself is a latent sensor, for he says, “Sometimes,” his pause stretches into the air between them with his chakra, “the clan doesn’t know what it needs.”</p><p>Haia chews on the idea for a bit, not sure if she trusts it. But then she turns back to the man and his storm of chakra. She reasons that he must know what he’s talking about. </p><p>“The clan doesn’t know what it needs.” She tastes the air with her tongue, something about the man’s chakra invites cheek, she grins at him, “But you know the clan needs sensors.”</p><p>She feels the man’s chakra bend and unbend as he bows before adding, “You should go left at the hall, it’s the third door.”</p><p>Elated, she bows to the man in departure and skips down the hall. She pauses at the third door, hears off key plucking and pushes her way in. </p><p>“Finally,” even without her eyes she can feel Izuna pouting, “It’s been three hours.”</p><p>Haia shrugs and sits down next to him, “I didn’t even think I was a sensor before,” she waves her arms around, “all of this.”</p><p>From the corner Sensei asks, “And now?”</p><p>She nods, “Yes.”</p><p>He moves across the room to stand in front of her, he puts his hands on her shoulders and turns her as he asks, “Yes, what?”</p><p>“Yes. I am a sensor.”</p><p>He snorts and unties her blindfold. She blinks back into the light and shuts her eyes to the onslaught of stimuli. Behind her palms her eyes water, but she’s grinning.</p><p>Saturdays and Sundays continue maintain their position as Haia’s favorite training days. As much as she enjoys physical vigor, she often finds that farm labor and taijutsu in a day send her into an exhausted-and-hungry stupor at night. </p><p>Sensing-Saturdays, as she comes to call them, exercise a part of her mind she hadn’t known existed. Soon she begins to differentiate individual chakras from the natural chakra spinning around them, and notes that her range widens. Then she begins to categorize familiar chakras. Strangers become familiar, she begins to make up stories for them. There, snotty Tamura, and behind her Hikaku-sama’s sisters.</p><p>The women bustling in the kitchen and the laundry, the elders in their meeting rooms, the nobles of their clan, women cloistered behind heavy doors, and men with Burning-Chakra. When she begins to detect their personalities she names them. Mrs. Fussy who runs the laundry, Sourpants, who teaches Izuna’s wild-chakra-ed brother (Mr. Prickly) to play the Shamisen. </p><p>Then Sensei gets it in his head to teach her to play Shogi.</p><p>“I want you to both read General Iroh’s treaties on Shogi. Of all the old scholars, he understood the game best.”</p><p>Izuna and Haia sit across from each other with a board between them. Izuna picks a piece up and turns it in his palm, while Haia hefts the tome and wonders where she is going to find the time to read it. Spring’s arrived with its usual colorful pizzazz, but that also means crop sewing. She shrugs at the knots in her shoulders, and plays with her pendant nervously.</p><p>“It’s a game of twenty pieces, you can read about each one from General Iroh,” Sensei waves a hand imperiously, “But the real goal is to use these pieces to checkmate your opponent.”</p><p>He gestures between them, “Now, greet each other.”</p><p>“We already greeted each other’,” says Haia as Izuna bows.</p><p>“It’s part of the ceremony,” says Sensei as he rubs at his scar, “Alright, play.”</p><p>“But we don’t know how to play.”</p><p>Izuna scoffs at her, “I know how to play, Ka-san made sure of it.”</p><p>Sensei smiles down at her, “Nothing like a trial by fire.”</p><p>She gets her ass handed to her.</p><p>Through it all, interspersed between her sewing rice, her training with the other recruits, and her sword-and-shogi lessons with Izuna, are the missions.</p><p>She trembles before her opponents, overwhelmed, but she notices her growth. Adversaries from across the field burn with their non-familial signatures, intents evident in the ebb-and-flow around them. </p><p>Her first kill comes almost easily. The boy is older and from one of the clans allied to the almost-mythically-monstrous Senju. In her memory he grows before her, till his atrocious size dwarfs her own. But it makes him slow, and she can sense the earth-jutsu he tries to sneak beneath her feet. In the end it almost feels like he fell on her sword.</p><p>As she looks on as while he expires, she can’t help but feel the feeble grasping fear. The last gasp, his silent cry, sends her onto her hands and knees to vomit.</p><p>She’s elbow deep in her first real trip to a front.</p><p>Haia doesn’t really care that Lord Kashimoto want lord Yamakashi’s apple orchards (much to Sensei’s chagrin), but she understands duty. And her duty to the clan means she spends most of her days ducking under groundcover, serving as a courier and scout for the clan.</p><p>She inhales the tight chill air and shivers. The higher altitude this close to lightning means the terrain differs significantly from the usual plethora of plant life in fire-country.</p><p>Hiding here requires thoughtfulness, care, and a decent amount of luck.</p><p>The ability to sense also helps, she thinks, as she skitters up a tree and hides in the foliage, dimming her chakra.</p><p>The two nin pause below her and Haia takes a quick peak, discerning two dark skinned men running beneath her.</p><p>“Do you hear that?” says the bald one as light gleams off his head. </p><p>“Hear what?” the other man’s tone adds, ‘you dolt’.</p><p>Baldy pauses, probably blushing, “Nothing. I hear nothing. Which means somebody is probably here.”</p><p>“Right,” says sassy, “You don’t think that might be us?” Haia feels a trickle of cold sweat eek down her back, she resists the urge to wipe it.</p><p>“Well-”</p><p>The sassy leader starts running again, she can feel his footsteps on her hiding tree, “This mission is time sensitive. We gotta get this scroll to HQ. It’ll be harder to cross the border soon, with all these Uchiha swarming around.”</p><p>She doesn’t hear baldy’s response, but can’t imagine what he would say. A scroll huh? She mulls it over while she waits for their chakra to fade into the distant haze beyond her range.</p><p>Sassy was right though; the border is swarming with members of her clan. Eastern camp rests a twenty-minute sprint by the bend of a steeply incised river.</p><p>She pauses in the middle of camp admiring the natural overhang in the rock carved out by the springtime floods eroding softer strata. The mist splashes up from the white water, but the altitude means its yet to be blisteringly hot, something she could get used too. </p><p>“You there,” says captain Hideki, a man in his thirties with a wispy mustache and a lazy eye, “What have you brought back?”</p><p>She trots to him and deposits her scroll, interest flashing as she watches the seal break for a bit of his blood.</p><p>“Anything to report.”</p><p>They’d been taught proper protocol for reporting early in her training days, “Enemy activity, I crossed paths with two men at the mouth of the valley. They were carrying a scroll, heading north, and trying to avoid detection.”</p><p>“Hm,” he turns his head so he can look at her with his wandering eye, “They didn’t give you any trouble?”</p><p>She shakes her head and then remembers herself, “No sir, I sensed their approach.”</p><p>“I remember reading that one of our recruits was a sensor, that you then?” he pulls at the right side of his mustache, “I reassigning you Miss…”</p><p>“Haia, sir.”</p><p>“Report to Aymumu-san, she’s taking care of hiding the camp, and of all of our scouts. She has an assignment for you.”</p><p>Haia bows. The clan generally sets their camps up in the same way every time, so she makes her way to where she knows the scout-tent should be. She crosses paths with clansmen, familiar chakra signatures on unfamiliar faces.</p><p>One stands out, gentle as a cool breeze on a hot day, but with depth and body.</p><p>“Haia-chan,” Nanase pokes her head above the wall defending their camp. Haia can feel her chakra signature flicker, no doubt re-enforcing the genjutsu hiding the camp. </p><p>Someone taps Nanase’s shoulder, the other girls look down on somebody Haia can’t see.</p><p>“Come through the gate Haia-chan,” says Ayumu from the other side of the fence, “Hideki-san told me he would be sending someone our way.”</p><p>Haia does as she’s told, and peers around the outside of their camp. The fence sits on the precipice of the gorge carved out by the river, and all three use chakra to avoid slipping into it. Ayumu looks her up and down, then activates her sharingan and does it again. Satisfied, she nods.</p><p>“I was ordered to report to you for a scouting mission.”</p><p>Ayumu turns away. She’s short, even for a woman, with close cropped, straight hair and dark grey eyes. But even though Haia can already look into her eyes, the woman towers over her.</p><p>“Enemy forces are gathering to the north across the border,” she nods with her arms crossed, “We need to find their camp before they find ours.”</p><p>Behind them Nanase fiddles with her hand signs, before finally finding her resolve. Haia watches fascinated as she flashes through boar, ox, rabbit… The wall and camp disappear.</p><p>Ayumu looks over Nanase’s work, then peers at it with her sharingan, before poking it.</p><p>It’s like she’s pulled at the hem with a pair of scissors, the camp and fence flash back into existence, “Do it again.”</p><p>“Yes Sensei,” Nanase nods and exhales.</p><p>“You,” Ayumu says to Haia, “Report to tent 4 to get your quadrant.”</p><p>Haia bows, leaving Nanase to her stern teacher.</p><p>Tent 4 houses the logistics unit. Four sour faced Uchiha sit across from each other arguing about provisions when she makes her entrance. They stare at her, her gaze darts around the room.</p><p>“Uh- I”</p><p>“We need to provision the western camp, they are far more exposed than we are, and need supplies too last. We don’t need scouts following our shinobi to determine its location.”</p><p>“No,” says another, older, man, “We don’t want to supply the camp, because we don’t want to supply the enemy should it fall.”</p><p>“But if the camp isn’t supplied adequately then the men there won’t be able to perform optimally.”</p><p>Haia wonders what the men and women in the western camp would think about this argument. They would obviously want supplies.</p><p>“Look here,” rehashes the old man as he points to a crudely drawn map, “Do we want to be responsible for strengthening our enemy?”</p><p>This sounds like an old argument.</p><p>“But how often do our camps fall?” Asks Haia, it almost sounds like these people want to it go.</p><p>A teenage boy steps forward, “We shouldn’t argue in front of the kid,” the sash around his arm identifies him as the captain, “What are you here for.”</p><p>“Ayumu-sama told me to get a quadrant.”</p><p>The teen looks her up and down, he’s short too, with shiny black hair and black eyes and a splint around his arm, “Aren’t you a little young to be a scout?”</p><p>She can’t help herself, “Aren’t you a little young to be a captain?”</p><p>The older man laughs in spite of himself, “A quadrant, well,” he turns to the map and rubs his beard as the kid behind him glares down at her, “4-C’s been empty since Ichi died,” he waves her over and points out the map.</p><p>The square he outlines looks about the same as every other square on the map. A few doodles demarcate one feature or another, but by and large the topography, elevation, landmarks- it’s all blank. Are Lord-what-it’s apples really worth it?</p><p>“They didn’t give us much to go on did they?”</p><p>The man looks down at her curiously.</p><p>“They did not. But the corner of your quadrant, 4-C, is demarcated by a rock the looks like a horse head.”</p><p>“Okay,” says Haia, and then, “What is demarcate?”</p><p>“Marked, identified by. You will be given three days of supplies, you spend two nights in the field and then return back by the end of the third day, unless something urgent arises, then you report back immediately,” he looks at the teen and grins, “Bishamon will be your handler. He is captain of all the young scouts.”</p><p> “By urgent you mean I find the camp.”</p><p>“Or see a large group of enemy nin, greater than 10.”</p><p>Haia drags her gaze up and down Bishamon with a squint, “I have a cousin Bishamon.”</p><p>He eyes her right back, “I was friends with your brother.”</p><p>Like a snail, she retreats back into her shell with a flinch.</p><p>She shares a tent with the other children, twelve in all. Nanase and Haia bag cots next to each other and they whisper into the night.</p><p>“Ayumu-sensei, do you like her?”</p><p>Haia sees Nanase shift and hears a puff as she exhales, “She is ‘exacting’, and I’m learning a lot.”</p><p>“But do you like her?”</p><p>Because Haia likes Kaito-sensei, a lot. Sometimes, when she’s alone in her house she wishes, quietly, desperately, that he was her father. She wishes that bad dream snoring in the dark room behind the door would disappear with the day light. </p><p>Nanase sighs, “It doesn’t matter does it?”</p><p>Across the tent, Yorimatsu shushes them. Haia frowns, irritation at her one-time friend spiteful in her belly.</p><p>She wakes up to regret the next morning. Two nights in the field mean little sleep, so in theory all she should be doing in camp is catching up. She yawns over her breakfast, and waves Nanase a tepid goodbye before following one of the older scouts to quadrant 4-C.</p><p>The rock could look like a horse’s head, from a handstand with a squint. She pulls out the map. </p><p>Horse-head rock lies in the corner, written in a neat script. She angles the map so that she and it face the same direction, north. </p><p>The first day finds her ankle deep in the loamy mucky hiding beneath thigh high ferns. Scrambling beneath the shrubbery the preferred option to ducking when she senses the occasional nin.  Thank goodness she doesn’t have a pollen allergy. Wafts of it churn lazily in the afternoon sunlight.</p><p>She takes notes of the topography and marks the map with interesting features. A snake like meander in the river as it splashes through a spruce grove. The small waterfall with the hiding spot behind it, and a little high-altitude swamp that somehow manages to be chilly and humid at the same time. </p><p>Her curiosity tempts her to walk through the last one. It looks so pretty with the morning sky glinting off still waters. She falls into waist high mud for her effort, and itches for the next three days.</p><p>Still no camp, though enemy activity increases to the northeast. </p><p>The first night drops below freezing, and she shivers from cold as well as fear. She would look at the familiar stars, but the full moons brightness outshines them.</p><p>She fumbles through a bleary morning, moving to the southeast, and away from whatever the enemy nin buzz around. She finds giant beetles with shiny black carapaces, underneath a downed tree, and a slow moving turn in the river that she dips her feet into while she eats lunch. </p><p>She spends the next night in a hollow spruce tree, and sleeps better for it. The next morning, she wakes up to wood smoke and finds an abandoned campfire not too far from her nest. She throws out her senses and finds the civilians, hunter perhaps, making their way south. </p><p>Her jaws crack when she yawns as she internally berates herself for falling into such a deep sleep, before wandering to the northeast again. </p><p>When she reports back, Bishamon-san looks down at her notes with one of his thin brows arched.</p><p>“Beetle-hole? The hiding waterfall?” he sputters, “Snake bend?”</p><p>Haia shrugs, “Sure, there were beetles the size of horse-shoes in a hole: beetle hole. The river moved like a viper at snake bend, and there was hiding spot behind hiding waterfall,” She pauses as she looks between her superior and the map, “I also noted enemy activity here in the northeast corner. You should probably send someone to 3-D.”</p><p>Ignoring the latter, Bishamon-san says, “Has anyone told you that your very literal.”</p><p>“I don’t know what that means.”</p><p>“No metaphor or allegory, just the word as the word.”</p><p>Haia, covered in dust and sweat, can only cant her head at him, “So I’m not poetic?”</p><p>Sensei sometimes tries to make her read poetry, it makes her well rounded, he says, but she doesn’t like it. </p><p>“I don’t know what I meant,” then he slips a hand through his glossy dark hair and says, “You’re sleeping in tent 4, dear cousin.”</p><p>The next morning Captain Hideki leads her to quadrant 4-E.</p><p>“What’s with the stink eye kid?” He asks her with a grin as he idly pulls at the left flap of his moustache.</p><p>“I asked for 3-D.”</p><p>He laughs, “Technically you said somebody should patrol 3-D, and somebody is.”</p><p>She sighs with her whole body, flapping her arms, making a big show of it, “Fine, but let’s hope this guy is ‘up to snuff’.”</p><p>“How do you even know that expression kid?”</p><p>She shrugs, “You hear things in camp.”</p><p>“Fair enough,” he says with a wave.</p><p>She trudges her way to the northwest corner first. Sure enough, most of the enemy activity cuts through that corner.</p><p>“The enemy has something northwest of 4-E and northeast of 4-C. Somebody needs to check out 3-D,” she says to Bishamon at her debriefing.</p><p>“Somebody has been assigned,” say absently as he looks over her map, “Wait, the waterfall of 10,001 droplets, the tossing wind’s merry spruce grove?” he laughs in spite of himself, “The mossy rock of springtime hour-keeping?”</p><p>“I was trying to be poetic.”</p><p>“Yes,” he says with a flash of his even teeth, “But now I have no idea what you’re talking about.”</p><p>“There is a detailed report with description. I call the last one moss-clock, because it looks like one of those rocks you can tell time with and its covered in moss.”</p><p>Bishamon squints down at her and rubs his chin, tentatively checking for hair, “You should be careful Haia-chan, some captains would take this as insubordination.”</p><p>Uh-oh, Haia takes a step back and bows, “I didn’t mean it sir. The next report will have nothing but serious names.”</p><p>Bishamon rolls his eyes, “Serious names are boring. I said some, but not me,” he sighs, “Just be careful.”</p><p>Puzzled, she says, “Thanks.”</p><p>The next morning Hideki rolls his good eye over her, “You got 3-D. Be careful kid, the last two scouts that were assigned this place disappeared.”</p><p>Haia flicks her eyes up and down his person, she knows what she’s capable of, and what she can’t do. She can sneak, she absolutely cannot take on armed adults, it would be her death. </p><p>“Yes Sir.”</p><p>She sneaks around quadrant 3-D more carefully than she had 4-C and 4-E. </p><p>Already she can tell that the energy around the enemy nin is more frenetic, and there are more of them. The primary corridors run southwest-northeast from 4-C and southeast-northwest from 4-E. Both paths converge in the northern most section of 3-D. Topography begins to steepen and vegetation disappears about halfway through the quadrant. Haia slashes a line though the middle of the map and writes, groundcover disappears, and then shortly thereafter- all plants gone, with another line. </p><p>She doesn’t break the tree line, and when she senses a group of shinobi from the periphery of her range she slinks back underneath the groundcover and pulls in her chakra signature. Hard pack replaces the mud from the lower elevation quadrants, but the mosquitoes persist, and the earth smells like the loam of fire country. </p><p>Shinobi flash above her, she remembers more about their chakra signature than their appearance. One young man, she assumes it’s a he, flits above her, his powerful chakra makes the hairs on her arm stand up likes she’s in the middle of a lightning storm.</p><p>She takes note of the rough time of day on the map and writes memorable chakra towards the camp- lightning. Not that she’s sure it’s a camp, but it’s a good a guess as any.</p><p>She waits till night falls to investigate further. Till the blue black of night permeates her surroundings and the pinprick lights wheel uncaring above her. The cold nips her fingers and her breath makes a fog of the air around her. </p><p>Patrols crunch through the earth sending rocks sliding around her, but they take no note of her. Haia, a patient and caring child, has learned how to avoid adult’s unwanted attention. </p><p>Slowly she spirals in towards something, a cluster of chakra signatures begins to take shape out of the fog and gloom of distance. She makes out the spicy scent of burning pine, then roast meat, her mouth waters. Enemy patrols zig and zag around her, but none catch her. She’s lucky, these shinobi do not specialize in tracking. She almost smacks into the roughhewn pine of their camp wall.</p><p>Time to go.</p><p>Before her a great cliff blocks out the light of the stars and casts the whole of the valley in its shadow, she can hear the river crashing somewhere near. She pulls out her map and circles the Northwest corner of 3-D, next to the cliff and scrawls camp. Haia yawns, her jaw cracks, but its tool cold to sleep and she’s too close to the enemy.</p><p>She crouches on hands and knees, and slowly pushes backwards. She winds her way back out, a widening spiral, but along a different path, she hits a creek and notes it as she pauses to rest. Though the eastern horizon has yet to begin to glow, she knows it can’t be far from dawn.</p><p>Like fireflies dancing, presences emerge from the dark. As they approach Haia feels the panicked vibrations of a young Uchiha, and the intent of the older shinobi. Whoever it is, he’s leading them right towards her. Adrenaline shakes the sleep off her like a dog shakes water of its coat, her skin begins to dance with goose pimples as she tries to find a place to hide. No trees, and she’s far from the groundcover.</p><p>It’s dark though, and the enemy follow her young kinsman too closely to pay much attention to anything else. Or so she hopes as she dashes across the creek and stumbles over a hole between three rocks. She clambers in to wait, sneaking as far into the hidey hole as she can. She feels her heart beat behind her ear and in her cheek as she waits, trying to calm her breath. The birds nesting on the cliff nearby begin to wake with the call of the dawn. Then, over her own panic, she hears someone else’s. </p><p>This close she recognizes the chakra, but can’t pinpoint the familiarity. She knows this person. Her heart rate jumps and her stomach churns, she hopes it’s not Nanase. But no, her cousin’s fire chakra flows with the cool presence of water. The boy in front of her has fire, and maybe and edge of earth, it’s a bit unwieldy. Ah, Yorimatsu.</p><p>She closes her eyes, but that only makes her sensing jump out. What is he doing here?</p><p>One motions jerks into the next as he jumps around. Then, as one, the enemy nin draw their blades. Their buzzing lightning chakra gives her a headache. None stand out, but they don’t have too, they work as a team, herding Yorimatsu to the river. The boy stumbles one way, then another, somewhere along the line his ragged breaths have turned to sobs. The birds watch piteously on their cliff.</p><p>His wild fear flicks against her. Her nausea rises, but she knows if she does anything they will kill her too. She presses deeper into the hole. The birds note the invaders and begin to twitter angrily, one or two even begin to pelt the interlopers. </p><p>Then she feels Yorimatsu’s shock, one of the men stands above him.  Yorimatsu’s panic begins to subside as a cold, bone-deep fear replace it.</p><p>She shifts in her fear and anger and helplessness. Maybe she breaths too loudly. Her adrenaline jumps, her back straightens and cold sweat licks its way down her back.</p><p>“Do you hear that?”</p><p>She holds her breath.</p><p>The fracas from the birds garbles the first response, but the second, “Just the swallows, they will settle after we leave.”</p><p>They cluster around Yorimatsu’s struggling form. He’s dying, but they don’t finish the job, instead they leave him there, in pain and fear, struggling to breath. His panic dims, the pain disappears.</p><p>Haia, whose limbs shake at the thought of leaving, can only sweat and cry in her hole in the ground as she feels him expire from across the creek. </p><p>She waits until full light before she pokes her head out. Nobody except for Yorimatsu, already dead. She crosses the creak and stares down at him. </p><p>His eyes peak through a sliver the width of a fingernail, black and glittering. He lies slumped on a rock, curled to one side, his hair mats in a clot of dried blood. A beetle crawls along his cheek. She doesn’t bother to count the stab wounds. </p><p>Should I feel sad? She stares down at Yorimatsu’s body and thinks. Should I feel guilty for not trying to do something? Should I? Should I- feel grief? I didn’t even like him, but I didn’t want… this. The child-hunters. </p><p>This is terrible.</p><p>The birds take note of her and begin to tattle to one another. Their beady eyes follow her, as if she is the threat to their families. Her adrenaline jumps at the thought of investigators. The sun nears its zenith by the time she’s pulled herself away. Exhausted, afraid and numb, Haia leaves Yorimatsu to the swallows. </p><p>She stumbles back to camp that evening, surprising Bishamon, who says, “You have another night in the field.”</p><p>She blinks at him. Recognizing the look of the lost, Bishamon sits her down, “It’s okay to stay in camp, this once.”</p><p>Haia stutters back into her brain. She’d left Yorimatsu with the intent of delivering her map to camp. The enemy hideout! Haia jumps down from the bench and collapses onto her hands and knees. Where is her pack? She gets to her feet and wobbles to it, opening it, reshuffling it until she finds the grimy piece of paper. </p><p>“Enemy, northwest in 3-D, at the base of that cliff, about 1 km from this bend in the river.”</p><p>Bishamon frowns and rubs the imaginary beard on his chin, “We’ve been getting reports there is something there, but nobody close enough for verification.”</p><p>“I almost ran into it. There’s a camp there.”</p><p>“We had a few people patrolling 3-D. We should wait to see what they say.”</p><p>Haia’s look zips right to him. She’s almost as tall as he is, and her glazed gaze and red-rimmed eyes burn him, “Yorimatsu is dead. So that’s one report you won’t be getting.”</p><p>Comprehension, a widening of the eyes and a frown, fly across the young captain’s face, “You knew him.”</p><p>Haia looks down and shrugs, “I did, but-” but she didn’t like him, couldn’t even bring herself to like him after he’s died. Does that make her a bad person?</p><p>Bishamon’s hand on her shoulder surprises her out of her musings. She looks at him, her eyes wide and pupils blown, “Take the rest of the afternoon off, this was good work.”</p><p>That evening she hunches over her bowl of congee by the fire. Nanase sits next to her, knee to knee.</p><p>“Yorimatsu,” says Nanase.</p><p>“I didn’t feel- right, I didn’t feel upset. He was dead, and I wasn’t sad.”</p><p>She feels shame rather than sadness, no grief at the loss of a clansmen, only guilt at its absence.</p><p>“He was a bully, you don’t need to feel sad,” says Nanase, more pragmatic, and already a capable killer. She chases a pea around her rice with a chopstick. </p><p>“But it was- just so bad. It was terrible. They didn’t even really kill him Nanase. They just left him there exposed and drowning in his own-” She stops, can’t think about it anymore.</p><p>Nanase takes a bit of her congee, “It was wrong of them to do that to a member of our clan.”</p><p>“That shouldn’t be done to anybody,” breaths Haia in one breath. She wants to spit and claw at the injustice.</p><p>Nanase looks at her cousin stunned, “What are you talking about, shouldn’t. Shouldn’t? It happens all the time.”</p><p>“But it shouldn’t happen.”</p><p>Nanase blinks and takes a bite. She’s not angry, simply puzzled. She puts a strand of her short straight hair behind her ear, “What should happen?”</p><p>Haia shrugs as she runs her fingers through her hair. She’ll need to cut it; harvest will be upon them soon.</p><p>Two mornings later the camp buzzes in anticipation. From a distance she spies Izuna. He’s standing next to his brother, both dress in full armor. Haia would laugh, if it weren’t so serious. A man whose chakra she recognizes stands between them. It’s the one that burned from her first day in the blindfold. Bishamon lands next to her. He’s in armor too, though less fine, with a wazikashi strapped to his side, as she watches he slips gloves over his knotty-knuckles.</p><p>“Bishamon-san,” says the man in his sardonic voice as he strides over with a humorless grin, “Is your team ready?”</p><p>Bishamon kowtows, followed quickly by Haia and a group of men. </p><p>The captain unbends and the team follows.</p><p>“Yes, I’ll be leading the infiltration team.”</p><p>“And this one?” the man gestures to her. Izuna cocks his head at her from behind his father’s leg. This can only be Uchiha Tajoma-dono.</p><p>“The scout that found the camp. She will be on courier duty. Unlike your son’s, she’s still unfit for battle.”</p><p>Haia looks at the ground, it’s true, it seems her singular gift is hiding.</p><p>“That will change, no doubt.” </p><p>Luckily, the conversation turns from her quickly. </p><p>Two days later, after the battle, Haia can only thank whatever gods existed that Bishamon kept her as a courier. She’d be dead otherwise. They’ve won the day, have the Uchiha, but as Haia looks down at her clansmen, honored with an unmarked mass grave, she wonders at their victory.</p><p>She breaks out of her dreams in cold sweats for weeks after. If it’s not the bodies in the mass grave opening their eyes and staring at her, it Yorimatsu, who creaks his lids open and asks, “Why didn’t you do anything?”</p><p>On one such morning she wakes herself in the pre-dawn with a silent strangled scream. </p><p>Irritated and free of farm duty and cleaning for the day she meanders over to Sensei’s house. But before she can knock on the door, Izuna opens the door with a frown. </p><p>“You’re coming with me,” he orders casually.</p><p>“Huh?” she answers coherently.</p><p>Then she sees Madara-sama’s reflection in the gleaming dark floors as she sulks into the room and almost turns around. The only thing that stops her is the sheen of hope flashing across her friend’s face (and the food). </p><p>So for all that Madara-sama, heir apparent to the Clan, prodigy of the sharingan, apple of his brother’s eye, intimidates her, her quite fear bows to the power of her friendship with the boy’s brother. </p><p>It’s Izuna’s pout she decides. Even she’s not immune to it, and Haia is herself a master of the art-of-cute. </p><p>Besides, she’s skipped breakfast that morning and dinner the night before and the kitchen staff are definitely not immune to Izuna’s cute. She piles her plate high with pastries and sits on her knees, setting up the shogi board while Izuna prepares the tea.</p><p>Madara-sama side-eyes her upon her entrance, and returns to staring out the window and sighing. Clearly he would rather be somewhere else. </p><p>“Why does this ceremony have to take so long?”</p><p>“I’m just trying to add some culture to your life ni-sama.”</p><p>Madara grins at him, “We shinobi have to start living longer before we can enjoy things like culture.” </p><p>Haia sits down gingerly and picks up the book lying discarded on the windowsill. The writings of Fire Sage Zuko. </p><p>She begins the arduous task of reading as the brother’s nit-pick behind her. Why did they invite her? Doesn’t Izuna know how much higher class they both are? By all rights they shouldn’t even be friends! She exhales her panic.</p><p>Fire Sage Zuko… turns out to be more interesting than she first anticipated.</p><p>“Love and Peace, an era of love and peace?” She looks at Madara and waves the book in his face, “Do you know what he is talking about?”</p><p>The older boy shrugs, “Haven’t read it yet, a friend gave it to me.”</p><p>Izuna tries to snatch it from her, but she yanks it away, almost toppling the tray of egg tarts piled daintily on the table.</p><p>“Can I borrow this?”</p><p>Madara looks at her with his face scrunched, like he can’t quite believe he heard her ask, “No, my friend gave it to me.”</p><p>He holds his hand out, expectant. Haia almost runs away, but then… he is the heir. Reluctantly she hands it back, hungry for more.</p><p>Izuna, glancing wearily between his brother and his friend says, “Sensei has a copy. I can get it for you.”</p><p>“Why do you want to read this anyway?” asks Madara, “Aren’t you a peasant?”</p><p>“Why would you want to read it, aren’t you an asshole?” Haia fires back thoughtlessly, forgetting momentarily that its Madara she’s speaking to, not Izuna.</p><p>Madara gasps, Izuna gapes, Haia bows frantically, repeatedly, “I didn’t mean it.”</p><p>“Whatever,” Madara throws the book on the table, already uninterested, instead he looks out into the garden and sighs.</p><p>Haia really puts her foot in her mouth when she asks baldly, “Are you in love?”</p><p>The older boy shuts his mouth faster than a Guinee fowl snapping up a particularly tasty centipede, then stutters out a few incoherent sounds.</p><p>“Who would ni-sama be in love with?” Asks Izuna as he cocks his head to the side and surveys his brother.</p><p>“I dunno, his friend? The one you complain about.”</p><p>Izuna’s face twitches into a grimace.</p><p>Madara, incapable of uttering anything, gathers himself (and his book) before striding out the room with all the dignity of his Aunt Himiko after a particularly vicious social snub.</p><p>Izuna rolls his eyes at her, “Why would you ask that, he’s going to be unbearable about you now!” </p><p>“Because he spent the whole ceremony ignoring you and day dreaming out the window,” she scowls and throws an irritated look towards Izuna, “Only people who think they are in love do that.”</p><p>“Says who?”</p><p>“Says your aunt Himiko,” Haia had heard her complaining loudly about her daughter to the maids.</p><p>“Whatever, you’ve just made him unbearable for a week. You owe me.”</p><p>“You owe me! You said we would go train after this… thing.”</p><p>“Well, excuse me for trying to contribute-to-your-education,” he says with the tone of one copying an adult, “for trying to make you seem more ‘civilized’ and less like a peasant.”</p><p>Haia hides her hurt behind an eye roll, and shoves him, “If you’re going to be mean, then tell me because I am not friends with… with mean people!”</p><p>Izuna stands and runs to block the door, “Sorry! Sorry, I don’t mean-”</p><p>Haia glowers at the corner of the room hard enough to scare the settled piece of dust into movement, “It’s fine. You’re not, I am much lower than you are,” she reasons to herself.</p><p>Izuna, sensing that he has done something wrong and trying to find a way to stop it races across the hall and into the dojo. From there he pulls two child sized wooden training swords from the rack, “Let’s go practice.” </p><p>Haia grins reluctantly, and agrees, picking up Nanase from her house along the way. They end up by the fence again, the clan is running a training exercise for hunters at the practice grounds and so they have to make due. But after a few hours of practice bouts the call of the world outside begins to make itself heard. Haia’s hair, shorn for the growing season sticks to her forehead, while Izuna’s longer, cultivated locks stick up in matted licks of sweat. They sit together panting, eyeing the outside world. Nanase, more dignified with her hair up in a tail, can only roll her eyes</p><p>“Should we?” Haia asks.</p><p>“We should not!” says Nanase, “You know the rules,” she glares at Izuna.</p><p>Izuna, older and more wary stares a while longer, but even he is not immune, “I think we should,” and grins at her.</p><p>Nanase scoffs and rolls her shoulders, it’s her turn to pout, “I don’t like being left behind.”</p><p>“Then come with us,” says Izuna impatiently.</p><p>But Nanase stays behind, glaring wearily at them from between the cracks in the fence line.</p><p>“We will be back by dinner.”</p><p>The other girl turns away, “You said that last time.”</p><p>Izuna leads them to the same bend in the river that he’d gone to before, and though idyllic, Haia’s keen heart wants to see places that she hasn’t yet. She tugs on Izuna’s sleeve and pulls his glare from the deeps of the smooth-flowing elbow while wondering what the river has done to him. </p><p>They followed one game trail last time, this time Izuna chooses another. It truncates at a glade the size of the training grounds. </p><p>The golden afternoon light sets the thigh high grass an internal-vibrant green and the wind ripples across the tops pulling and pushing it like standing-waves upon the river. </p><p>A heron surveys them from his seat at one end of the pond, but he quickly returns to his imperious duty overseeing the local crayfish population. Dragonflies battle the wind. </p><p>Haia’s first impulse is to drop her sword and jump into the grass. So she does, and discovers when she rolls around that though its soft, it also itches. Who cares! Izuna looks down on her with his arms crossed.</p><p>“I thought we were supposed to be training.”</p><p>Haia scoffs, not wanting to waste a glorious moment in the sun. However, his tapping foot highlights his point, she sighs.</p><p>“I just want to sit here for a minute,” she pats the ground next to her, “join me.”</p><p>“And get grass stains in my clothes?” she can almost hear the peasant tacked onto the end of that statement, but doesn’t care.</p><p>“Fine, I will just sit here, meditating in nature without you. You can release your thoughts some other way.”</p><p>He rolls his eyes, but can’t deny the draw, reluctantly he sits. Eventually they both lean back and look up at the sky, the sun shines on the clouds illuminating them, the sky a deep blue grey looks back. Side by side they sink into a nature induced stupor. The bird calls and the wind blowing through the grass slowly ease away the constant worry that even young minds feel in times of conflict. Haia sighs, if only she could meditate like this all the time.</p><p>Izuna reluctantly gets up and shakes the torpor, “We really should practice,” he pulls at the wooden sword. Haia sighs dramatically.</p><p>The spar woodenly, but the lethargy of the afternoons seems to have seeped into their bones. Izuna instead begins instructing her in higher level katas, ostensibly for her sake, but really so he could run his fingers through the grass and boss her around. Haia, somewhat more ecstatic about learning, complies without complaint. </p><p>Then in the distance Haia makes out a new chakra. She pauses, earth and water. Then the rapid patter of little feet, and the swooshing clatter of a small body tangling in tall grass and falling to its knees. </p><p>A boy lies sprawled across the clearing. Haia goes to investigate, with Izuna not far behind, his practice sword in the guard position.</p><p>What a strange looking boy, is all Haia can think. He is shorter than she, with a round face and dark grey eyes. All off these features are standard, what is not typical is his ridiculous hair, half dark brown, half white-and-spikey. It reminds her of a magpie.</p><p>She’s so caught-up in his hair that she doesn’t really notice anything else and says exactly what she thinks, “What kind of kekegenkai leads to hair like that?”</p><p>But the boy’s sob breaks her from her amusement, “Hey, are you okay?”</p><p>She turns to Izuna, who stares wearily at the boy, “My name is Hai-” but he shuts her up with shove and mouths – no names.</p><p>The boy looks behind them, behind himself, huffs and jumps around, clearly spinning into a panic attack. Izuna pulls her away and looks down on the boy without emotion. Up close, Haia can see the clan sign ties about his forehead, “He’s a Senju.”</p><p>He’s tiny and armored, and shakily draws his sword. </p><p>The boy glares at them through red-rimmed eyes, but the heavy tread of booted feet in the distance diverts his attention. Adults, too far to Haia to feel.</p><p>Haia leans away from Izuna and says, “He can’t be a Senju, the Senju are demons, child killing monsters,” she looks at the kid with his silly bimodal hair, “This is just a boy.”</p><p>Watery and whispery the boy huffs painfully, “The Uchiha are monsters,” and in the distance the thudding looms. Haia thinks back to how she met Izuna, the terror in her gut, the surety of her own death and that of the boy next to her. She thinks about Yorimatsu, expiring in the sun, panting through his pain. It wasn’t the Senju that got him. </p><p>Uchiha, monsters, Ha! That can’t be true. </p><p>Izuna pulls at her arm, turning her insistently, “We have to go.”</p><p>Behind them the boy sinks into the grass and crosses his arms over his belly, sobbing. He’s given up, she realizes. And Haia, whose brother died, who has watched her young cousins come home in carts, who felt Yorimatsu beg the uncaring sky for release, knows death is the fate that awaits the boy behind them. </p><p>In that moment she makes a subconscious choice, one she will not recognize until years in the future with the help of hindsight. In that moment Haia chooses to see their similarities rather than their differences: chooses to see a young boy who wants to live, rather than the family that has been fighting hers so long. </p><p>And so she yanks her arms from Izuna’s grip and says, “We have to help him.”</p><p>Izuna, thunderstruck, can only stare at her, “He’s a Senju. They have been killing us for- for- since… since my grandfather was our age!”</p><p>“But!”</p><p>“We have to go!” Neither scream, aware of the men approaching, but tensions run high.</p><p>Haia runs back to the boy and yanks him up by the arm, desperation and panic giving her strength, “Don’t make me watch him die! I don’t want too; we’ve already seen so many.”</p><p>She’s told him about Yorimatsu, he knows about her brother, just as she knows about his.</p><p>“If we leave now we don’t have to see anything,” but Izuna’s lip trembles, showing a vulnerability he would never reveal to his father or older brother. </p><p>“You can’t mean that,” she wants to beg him, but remembers not to call Izuna’s name, instead she looks him steadily in the eyes, tears wetting her lashes, “Please. He’s no different.”</p><p>He sighs, his eyes wet with tears unshed, his mouth a grimace of pain, weary of the burden on his small shoulders. He squares them, glares at the boy but says nothing, only nods once.</p><p>Haia pulls the boy up by his hand and yanks his from his hand to throw it down. Then she drags him across the clearing. His clammy hand hangs limp in hers, she switches to his wrist for a better grip.</p><p>They make their way back to the game trail on small swift feet, and back down the path to the hollow tree. Up they go again, pulling the weary boy, and down into its gullet, behind them the sun sets. </p><p>The boy below them snivels and shivers, Izuna looks down on him and says, “If he can’t be quiet, he will get himself killed,” with all of the distain his little body can muster (which is quite a bit).</p><p>Haia only shushes him with a push and taps the boy a few times with her foot to get his too quiet.</p><p>A familiar chakra appears from the gloaming, though from the direction of the compound rather than the field. </p><p>“Who’s there?”</p><p>But Haia recognizes the voice and pops her head of the tree, “Hikaku-san, is that you?”</p><p>“You again,” he grimaces remembering the fish, Haia grins sheepishly at him, “What are you doing here?”</p><p>“Playing,” she pulls Izuna up by his collar. Izuna grimaces at her, still glaring at the boy. Hikaku jumps into a small bow.</p><p>Izuna pulls his gaze from the terrified boy and says, “What are you doing here Hikaku-san?”</p><p>“Patrol duty, there has been some trouble with another clan,” he gestures to them, “come down from there, it’s dangerous out here.”</p><p>Haia jumps down, catches the two swords that Izuna tosses down and waits for him to join her.</p><p>“I don’t want to find you two out here again,” Hikaku begins to lecture placing his hands on his hip, “I know it’s an adventure, but it’s not worth your life,” Izuna rolls his eyes, sensing a ramble, “Get stronger and then you can come out here.”</p><p>Hikaku goes on, but Haia only has eyes for the tree. </p><p>She hopes the boy will make his way home, even if it is at the Senju compound. </p><p>She hopes that he will live a good life. </p><p>She hopes she will never meet him again, that she won’t see him standing over the corpse of a cousin or friend on the battlefield.</p><p>Mostly she hopes the next time she comes to the tree that saved her life she won’t find his corpse beneath it.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I always like the under-developed part of any canon because there is a lot to play around with. Thus you have this, a founders era AU. For myself, I've added women with speaking rolls and personalities and people talking to each other about their feelings. </p>
<p>I hope you like it. </p>
<p>Please read and review!</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>